Kelly-Anne is obsessed with the high-profile case of a serial killer, and reality blurs with her morbid fantasies. She goes down a dark path to get the missing video of the murder of a young girl to whom Kelly-Anne bears a disturbing resemblance.
A thriller set partly in the virtual rooms of the internet’s dark web, “Red Rooms” begins with a serious premise and pushes forward with only the silliest ideas that could spring out of it. At the beginning of Pascal Plante’s film, a serial killer has reached his day in court for committing horrifying, potentially unprintable crimes upon three known victims – teenage girls whose bodies were found in pieces and buried in the earth outside a residential neighborhood. What follows is a movie that allegedly attempts to challenge our perceptions of social vs. restorative justice by introducing two characters with differing ethics. What the movie is really doing is more straightforward and far more disappointing.
The protagonist is Kelly-Anne, played by Juliette Gariépy in a performance of determined stoicism that never quite manages to let us into her headspace. She’s a full-time model and part-time gambler of digital coins who has killed in both departments because of her stone-faced beauty and her monetary acumen. The other character is Clémentine, played by Laurie Babin in an opposing performance that maybe lets us into her head a little too often. She’s obsessed with the killer and is convinced of his innocence, to the degree that any evidence of guilt is, in her mind, manipulated by those in power.
We’re not entirely sure what to think about either of these women, which gets us some of the way toward appreciation for what Plante (who also penned the screenplay) is trying to do here. It’s evident at the beginning, for instance, that Clémentine is a stand-in for believers in Qanon and its members’ wild beliefs, ranging from the big lie about the last U.S. election to the ubiquity of a cabal of radical-leftist Satanists in a globalist government. We get a little hint of that type of extremism here when news of the killer’s videotaped murders drops. Perhaps the term “psyop” wasn’t entirely in fashion yet when the film was in development, as it seems like Clémentine is on the verge of using it.
The ultimate motivation of this character is sympathetic to a degree, though, which muddles and muddies the convictions of the story the movie is telling. That’s never clearer than during our journey through Kelly-Anne’s story. She tolerates Clémentine when the pair meet (the former avoids the claustrophobia of her apartment at bedtime until the presence of another human in her spartan existence forces a change) but otherwise remains wholly unreadable as she watches, with some hunger, the proceedings of the trial. By the way, we never get the fascination with the killer, a weaselly little man played by Maxwell McCabe-Lobos.
From what we can tell, he’s certainly no cult-of-personality figure, although the actor chills in his portrayal of sociopathic boredom at the whole affair. The trial scenes are the stuff of pure exhibitionism, forcing us to witness bits of the video and audio (although, oddly, the only things we actually see are his taunts while surrounded by blood) as a way of exploiting the violence inflicted upon the girls. The film gets no more profound than a scene where Clémentine is finally forced to confront those videos. It also gets no more facile than that scene, which marks the turning point toward the film’s real intentions.
For the sake of the surprise, those intentions won’t be revealed or discussed, only to say that we finally glimpse Kelly-Anne’s mind during this stretch of storytelling. It’s a diseased place, and the strangely extended climax has more to do with Bitcoin than we might think. By the time Kelly-Anne wears a peculiar disguise to make some point, the movie has lost its way entirely. All that’s left in “Red Rooms” is a lot of teasing, leading to facile sociopathy.
In Select Theaters Friday, September 6th
