Red Rooms

“Red Rooms” is a striking departure in tone and atmosphere from the one other Pascal Plante film I’ve seen, 2020’s “Nadia Butterfly.” That movie, set during the 2020 Summer Olympics, combines sports drama and coming-of-age for a story about a young swimmer’s decision to step away from competitive athletics. “Red Rooms” is also a character study of sorts, but its context is grim, its mood shudderingly cold. Mixing tense courtroom drama with a morbid cyber-thriller in the vein of Olivier Assayas’ “Demonlover,” “Red Rooms” exerts a grip through unnerving ambiguity.

Juliette Gariepy delivers an impressively cryptic performance as Kelly-Anne, an isolated woman in Montreal. Living alone in a sterile high-rise, she earns paychecks through modeling gigs and online poker, but spends much of her time enthralled by a grisly, high-profile criminal trial, in which a man, Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, terrifically chilling in his stillness) is accused of livestreaming the torturous murder of three young girls for paying internet viewers. Kelly-Anne attends the trial daily, dispassionately observing the alleged killer, the lawyers, and one victim’s distraught mother. It’s in court that she befriends Clementine (Laurie Babin), who, like a Manson groupie, is passionately sympathetic towards the accused.

The intensity of Kelly-Anne’s fixation on the trial is unsettling because the basis of her interest is unclear. Is she connected to the defendant or victims in some way? Has she discovered something relevant to the case through her computer hacking knowhow that the authorities haven’t found themselves? Or is it perverse fascination that compels Kelly-Anne to watch the trial unfold? The uneasy thrill of “Red Rooms” is in trying to parse its protagonist’s psychology, in scrutinizing Gariepy’s chilly stare for clues to her motivation.

We see surprisingly little of the gory footage at the center of the case. Instead, we watch characters as they watch the footage, or as lawyers describe it in gruesome detail. The actual content of true crime imagery is of less interest to Plante than how people respond to it, directly or indirectly (in one interesting word choice, a lawyer cites the need for jurors who could “absorb” the horror they’d have to watch). Looking almost spellbound as she coolly arrives in court each day, Kelly-Anne is inexorably drawn to the sadism, and, as a freaky “what-is-she-doing?!” climax reveals, she’s thoroughly unhinged by her obsession with crimes at hand. With so much tight framing on Gariepy’s face, you could cut the tension of the film with a knife.