RED ROOMS/LES CHAMBRES ROUGES (Pascal Plante 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

LAURE BABIN,JULIETTE GARIEPY IN RED ROOMS

PASCAL PLANTE: RED ROOMS (2023)

TRAILER

Quebec serial murder groupies

Every morning, two young women, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) and Clementine (Laurie Babin) wake up at the gates of the Montreal courthouse to attend the high-profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), an accused serial killer (seated in an Eichman-like glass box in the courtroom) whom they're obsessed with, who allegedly filmed his own sadistic and brutal killings of three well-off, pretty, blonde teenage girls, Kim, Justine, and Camille. The killer has performed the three sadistic killings and broadcast each of them live for wealthy paying customers on what are called "red rooms" on the Dark Web. Two videos have been found, one is missing. Their groupie obsession will bring Kelly-Anne and Clementine together, and apart, and to unexpected involvement in the trial's outcome, in the horrific snuff films, and in the search for the missing video.

The main focus of the film is on Kelly-Anne, the more mature and accomplished of the two groupies, a fashion model and successful online poker player of austere life style, high discipline and possibly psychopathic personality who llves in an airy, eery, dark flat with wall to ceiling views high atop a building amid howling wind. When the other groupie, Clementine, a naive waif from a far off provincial town, emerges as poor and homeless, Kelly-Anne takes her in and for a while becomes her mentor. Clementine, hyper, bubbly, misguided but arguably humane, quite the opposite of the fashion model, professes to be in love with the accused and to believe him innocent. The reserved, cat-like Kelly-Anne's relation to him is more ambiguous.

We learn that in her dark pad above the city Kelly-Anne also has her own kind of super-Alexa home AI called "Guenièvre." She speaks to Guenièvre in English (which Clementine isn't very good at). Kelly-Anne appears to possesss many more cyber-skills, almost super-skills. Her involvement in the trial, when it becomes known, comes to seriously jeopardize her modeling work. Plante's originality and ingenuity lie in the way he weaves Kelly-Anne and the accused murderer into a single cyber-horror story.

My discomfort with this kind of material led me back for guidance to the benevolent Roger Ebert, and his two reviews (1995 and 2011) of David Fincher's Seven, which some writers have mentioned - also Zodiac (2007) - in connection with Red Rooms. Ebert understandably took both seriously. He said Seven was not "deep or profound" but provides the "convincing illusion" of being so, and "intends to fascinate and appall" (and presumably succeeds). He described Zodiac appropriately in detail. It's a movie heavy with detail, wearyingly at times, but is a near-masterpiece. To revisit these films in Ebert's company is to confirm that lurid material about perverse murderers can, indeed, be made into worthy films - though in my view the widespread admiration of The Silence of the Lambs, whose luridness pushes it over the edge, is unwarranted.

Plante is skillful in the way he focuses more and more on the two young groupies, then narrowing most of the focus to Kelly-Anne, while still keeping the trial alive as a theme. He weaves a creepily intriguing reveal of an association of horrific killings and snuff films with up to date cyber crime details of Dark Web "red rooms" and the payment of big money complicit in despicable murders and propagation of images of them. All this is well calculated to deliver exquisite pleasure to genre fans.

Unfortunately Red Rooms falters at the end. It has many balls to juggle, and winds things up in too much of a hurry with a slightly fuzzy finale in the "Black Mirror" manner. Despite an accomplished beginning, the movie consequently fades in comparison with the clarity and mastery of Fincher. It even finishes by seeming to lack an awareness of the seriousness of the crimes it takes as its starting and finishing points. But then, it's not aimed at a rounded picture like Fincher's films but is narrowed down to the sharp range of the fantasy-horror genre into which it is a reasonably original and polished entry.

Red Rooms, whose US release was unaccountably delayed for a year, nowhas a near-rave press rating of 83% on Metacritic, and RottenTomatoes also shows the English language reviews to be favorable. The French equivalent, AlloCiné, however, has provided a press rating of 3.9 or 70%, which is good, but a few reviewers found the promise was not fulfilled, and no less than Le Monde's critic says the film "turns into a demonstration" and "Leaves us cold." These few negative comments mesh with those of Chase Huchinson, one of the few English language nay-sayers so far, who says Red Rooms "never fully comes together in the end," and though Juliette Gariépy's performance is "fantastic," the movie itself "is just not nearly as bold as it thinks it is." Or, one might add, as convincing. Fincher fans can watch Red Rooms and form their own opinions. Those who aren't followers of this kind of film will avoid.

Of Seven Ebert initially wrote that it's "a film too disturbing for many people, I imagine, although if you can bear to watch it you will see filmmaking of a high order." This is true also of Zodiac, which has the added bonus of the duo of Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal. If you haven't seen these movies and can bear the subject, watch them before going to see Red Rooms. Then, if you watch Red Rooms, you can decide if it "out-Fincher's Fincher," as the trailer claims; or, if so, if that is desirable. Maybe it does something quite different, original in its way, but ultimately not as profound. Nonetheless Pascal Plante, whose third feature this is after 2018’s Fake Tattoos and 2020’s Nadia, Butterfly. is an original writer-director, and this film makes one want to see what he will do next.

Red Rooms/Les chambres rouges, 118 mins., debuted at Karlovy Vary Jul. 4, 2023. It was shown at numerous international festivals, some of them horror or fantasy ones, in 2023 and early 2024. US theatrical release Sept. 6, 2024 at IFC Center in NYC.