Red Rooms Is The Most Disturbing True-Crime Thriller You’ll Never Want To See Again
We see you, and you are obscene.
In Red Rooms, one of the most disturbing horror movies of 2024, it’s not the serial torturer and murderer you should be scared of.
For what it’s worth, there is something genuinely terrifying about Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). When we first meet the “the Demon of Rosemont,” he’s standing trial for the murder, dismemberment, and assault of three teen girls — acts that he filmed and later sold on the dark web for patrons in spaces called “red rooms.” His trial provides the framework for Pascal Plante’s harrowing feature, turning a harrowing tech-noir into a compelling courtroom drama. But Chevalier still isn’t the actual focus here. Instead, Red Rooms is more interested in Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a professional model, part-time online poker player, and studied internet sleuth. She also happens to be one of Chevalier’s many groupies.
It’s Kelly-Anne who brings us into the world of the film, embodying the soulless, parasocial obsession Plante is looking to condemn. She’s up every day at the crack of dawn to attend Chevalier’s trial, and by night, she’s holed up in her high-rise apartment in the heart of Montreal, quietly scouring the web for more info about Chevalier and his victims. Her reaction to, and obsession with, Chevalier’s crimes is just as unsettling as the crimes themselves. Her true motives remain a mystery, especially as Red Rooms slips into a taut, paranoid third act. All told, Plante delivers a harrowing portrait of our world, where truth isn’t just untenable, it’s irrelevant.
The first half of Red Rooms is immersed in Chevalier’s trial, building up to the fateful unveiling of the videos he auctioned on the dark web. That both the prosecutors and the defense agree to play the videos in their entirety, subjecting the jury and the victims’ families to a real-world horror show, is the first of many red flags. It doesn’t help that Chevalier’s crimes have whipped the media into a frenzy, turning what’s already a nightmare trial into a total circus. With TV crews camped outside of the public gallery, and groupies sitting in on the trial, Red Rooms paints a painfully accurate portrait of our true crime-obsessed world.
Kelly-Anne watches it all unfold in sphinx-like silence: her neutral gaze mirrors Plante’s camera as it sweeps through the courtroom, or lingers at the back of a crowd. At the outset, it’s hard to determine what, if anything, Red Rooms wants us to feel, or even what Kelly-Anne really thinks. But her true motives grow clearer as she grows closer to Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a fellow Chevalier obsessive who wears her passion — and her total naïveté — on her sleeve. Unlike Kelly-Anne, she’s keen to make her presence known: she insists that Chevalier is innocent when local TV crews ask for her statement, and has no problem calling into talk shows to make her sentiments known.
This all naturally incenses Francine Beaulieu (Elisabeth Locas), the mother of Chevalier’s youngest victim, Camille. She’s still searching for answers about her daughter’s murder, as the third and final video in Chevalier’s red room collection has yet to actually surface. The mystery of Camille’s fate supplies Red Rooms with a quiet propulsion, especially as Clémentine discovers the depths of Kelly-Anne’s own obsession — not just with Chevalier, but with the girls he allegedly stalked — and the details of her online behavior.
Red Rooms doesn’t shy away from society’s obsession with true crime, and no one gets away unscathed.
To say any more about the relationship that develops between Kelly-Anne and Clementine would be a disservice to the narrative Plante has crafted here, with all its haunting twists and turns. Even if so much of his story feels hidden behind smoke and mirrors, or comprised more of pixels than flesh and blood, Plante finds a way to keep the tension alive at every turn. Kelly-Anne’s unravelling is a subtle one, but it supplies Red Rooms with all the terror it needs. The fact that we never truly see any blood or gore, not even when the court views Chevalier’s red room videos, is just one of many fantastic uses of restraint. It’s the idea of these crimes that dominates our imaginations — and Kelly-Anne’s relationship with it — that will end up haunting our dreams.
