Spectacle of the Perverse
The oblique courtroom thriller “Red Rooms” offers chilling reflections on the rise of obsessive true crime fan culture.
“Red Rooms” is streaming now on Shudder.
In the haunting Canadian courtroom drama “Red Rooms,” icy protagonist Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) looks at people with the same withdrawn, mysterious gaze that she brings to her computer screen. For much of the film, Quebecois director Pascal Plante makes the audience the object of this gaze, as if we were trapped inside her desktop monitor. Plante goes to great lengths to obfuscate what lies behind her vacant stare. However, that which lies in front of it — a disturbing murder case, whose every aspect she seeks out — transforms her into an embodiment of the modern true crime cottage industry that spans podcasts and documentary films.
The film’s opening scene captures Kelly-Anne, a well-to-do, tech-savvy model, asleep on a sidewalk at dawn — framed as if she were a corpse on a coroner’s slab — while she awaits the opening of courtroom doors. It’s the first day of a high-profile murder trial whose story has rocked Montreal: Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), stands accused of butchering at least three teen girls and broadcasting his grisly crimes on the internet for anonymous high rollers. Kelly-Anne shows up as a curious observer, one of many, though her motives are shrouded in mystery.
In between court sessions, she’s befriended by fellow spectator Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a young fangirl who sees Chevalier as a sympathetic celebrity who she believes has been wronged. “There was a sadness in him that touched me,” she candidly admits. But Kelly-Anne keeps her own interest in the case close to the chest. She hints at believing in Chevalier’s guilt and doesn’t fawn over him, so it isn’t necessarily hybristophilia. “Why are you here?” Clémentine asks her near the courthouse, though neither she, nor the film provide immediate answers.
Plante goes to great lengths to obfuscate what lies behind Kelly-Anne’s vacant stare.
For most of the film, this central mystery looms, unanswered. Plante guides us through the case in parallel with glimpses of Kelly-Anne’s lurid, eerie attraction to it, using lengthy takes that creep through interior spaces. The effect of Plante’s impatient camera — it rarely sits still, sliding laterally on dollies, spinning on its axis, or zooming in on characters for longer than is comfortable or necessary — is subtle but psychologically immense: every facet of the case, as revealed by defenders and prosecutors, feels vital and attractive. We may not know Kelly-Anne beyond her uncanny stare, but given how the details of the case are meted out — the lurid details are unraveled gradually, each an enticement — we’re given a sense of what she sees in Chevalier’s trial, and why she independently scours the web’s darkest corners for more information.
As the film proceeds, its emotional and narrative opaqueness — à la the intentionally stilted dialogue of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — become revelatory. In her distant observations of not just Chevalier, but the families of the teenage victims, Kelly-Anne turns them into fictional characters in her own mental true crime opera, reflecting the ways in which real people’s lives are often reduced by the genre for the purpose of entertainment. She even begins stalking one of the victim’s mothers for any information she can find, fancying herself a high-tech vigilante sleuth.

The more Plante makes Kelly-Anne an all-purpose protagonist — someone who both imposes on the aggrieved in offensive ways, yet seeks to uncover information that might grant them closure — the more these contradictions elucidate the deep-seated allure of true crime. What seems on the surface like mere curiosity is separated by a razor-thin membrane from her desire (like that of true crime storytellers and audiences) to control, solve and even participate in real narratives, in ways that often retraumatize victims.
In the process of trying to discern Kelly-Anne’s motives, we become her cheerleaders.
Plante hammers this point home through his keen aesthetic sensibilities. When Kelly-Anne’s own activities begin verging on illicit, from the way she makes Bitcoin online, to the gruesome evidence she seeks out — for reasons that might be perverse, altruistic or both — the mounting leitmotifs of composer Dominique Plante gently guides us toward emotional crescendos that grow increasingly unnerving. This makes it impossible not to share in Kelly-Anne’s brief joy (a rare expressiveness during Gariépy’’s masterfully withheld performance) when she successfully acquires one of Chevalier’s snuff films, shot in what the prosecutors call “red rooms.” In the process of trying to discern her motives, we become her cheerleaders, hoping against hope (for the narrative’s sake) that she finds more grisly information. We become the rabid true crime audience, whose concerns lie not with the victims, but with a third party whose emotional investment is the central dramatic engine. In another world, she could have hosted “Serial.”
The shocking lengths to which Kelly-Anne goes sets “Red Rooms” apart from most modern courtroom dramas. In films such as Clint Eastwood’s “Juror No. 2,” questions of guilt and innocence are the whole point; they use crime drama mechanics to explore the biases that inform systems of (in)justice. None of that here. “Red Rooms” eschews these turning ethical gears in order to investigate how and why something as disquieting as death (the more disturbed, the better) has come to take on such commercialized and voyeuristic forms in the age of new media and the internet.
In a particularly shocking scene, Kelly-Anne cosplays one of the young victims (down to her braces) in order to draw Chevalier’s attention in full view of the dead girl’s mother. This upsetting moment seems to clarify several unknowns about Kelly-Anne, but subsequent scenes further complicate even these new assumptions. Does she want Chevalier’s acknowledgement? Perhaps. Or is she inviting that recognition to draw forth something that she believes only she can see? Perhaps.
At various times during “Red Rooms,” Kelly-Anne takes on the role of spectator, defender, prosecutor and investigator. But it’s the role of victim that proves most revealing, by circling back to the opening scene where she resembles a cadaver. In her impersonation of one of the three deceased teens, she completes a cycle of embodying every participant of the case, of taking up space in its every corner. By becoming one with the narrative she has built around these events, she subsumes them while being subsumed by them. A symbiotic relationship that refracts true crime through a prism, while reflecting back to us the hidden depravity within our most morbid curiosities.
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