“Red Rooms” - Film Review
The French have a unique ability to create courtroom films that become one of the most gripping movies of the year. They did it with Saint Omer in 2022, Anatomy of a Fall in 2023, and now Red Rooms in 2024. It’s quite a feat, given the fact that the average person would jump through quite a few hoops to get out of jury duty. All these films take place mainly within the bland, boring confines of a courtroom, yet the experience they provide the viewer is akin to a thriller. Red Rooms is a meticulously paced cyber-courtroom drama that picks apart humanity’s morbid obsession with serial killers.
In Montreal, the trial of the century is unfolding. Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is a suspected serial killer responsible for the brutal murders of three young women. The film’s title comes from the gruesome details of the case: not only did Ludovic supposedly murder these women, but he livestreamed their torture and death for anonymous, high-paying people on the dark web. What seems like an open and shut case is complicated by the fact that there is very little evidence that ties Ludovic to the crimes – except for a short glimpse in one of the videos that surfaces on the Internet. The recordings of the deaths of two of the three women have been found, but one is still missing. Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) watches the trial from one of the few public seats in the courtroom. While she has no personal stake in the matter, Kelly-Anne becomes obsessed with finding the missing recording.
courtesy of Nemesis Films
Red Rooms begins with a staggering seventeen-minute single take of the opening procedures of the trial. The audience sees Kelly-Anne, the jury, the defense, the judge, the prosecution, and the accused file in to take their seats. It feels oddly sterile and deeply uneasy, knowing what the goal is in regard to this gathering of people. At first glance, Kelly-Anne seems to be a stand-in for the audience. She’s an outsider who, for some unknown reason, is interested in how the case progresses. As the film goes on, Kelly-Anne’s true intentions become cloudy. Is she desperate to find the missing tape because she wants to prove Ludovic’s guilt or innocence? Her motives come under more scrutiny as she befriends Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a groupie of Ludovic who maintains his innocence. Kelly-Anne gives Clémentine a place to rest her head, food, and support, but there’s an undercurrent of something else. Kelly-Anne’s cards are not fully on the table.
The motive of Kelly-Anne paves the way for Red Rooms’ larger conversation about how society treats true crime. One would have to be living under a rock to miss the way that true crime retellings or documentaries have changed the way we watch films and TV. Real-life serial killers are played by heartthrobs, and the line between reality and fiction grows more blurred every day. Viewers feel like they can solve the unsolvable, and the bloodier the murder the better. Kelly-Anne is an online sleuth who believes she has the key to this trial. Red Rooms puts the viewer in the anxiety-ridden, obsessed mind of a woman to create this claustrophobic cyber-thriller. Much of the tension in the film is in the three typing dots that come before the “ding” of a notification.
courtesy of Nemesis Films
For all of the film’s building tension and focus on macabre topics, Red Rooms doesn’t show any of the violence the victims endured. Another version of this film would have relished in showing those violent acts, because that’s part of why some people seek out every true crime piece of media they can find. It comes from a voyeuristic desire to see what horrible things humans are capable of while staying safe at home. Red Rooms speaks to this curiosity and its ability to completely overtake a person’s life. The film washes over the audience in the slowest of burns to allow them to live in the uncertainty of justice in circumstances like this. There’s a feeling that something should happen when a person dies in this way. The family and friends who loved them should have closure of some kind, but what does that look like? Red Rooms is an intricate script that doesn’t try to tell the audience how they should feel watching it. It’s a highwire act that pays off in spades.
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