What's the most upsetting thing you can imagine existing on the internet? How about two videos—one 28 minutes in length, the other 31—each depicting a masked man methodically torturing, and then killing, a teenage girl. The videos, which feature dismemberment via power tool and an eyeball being slit open by an exacto knife, were broadcast live on the dark web to a paying audience of snuff-film enthusiasts.
Relax. You won't see any of that in Red Rooms, a French-Canadian psychological thriller directed by Pascal Plante, which does not feature any gore or violence. But it begins with something that is perhaps worse: A thorough description, even more detailed than the one I provided above, of the snuff films at the center of its plot. The descriptions are delivered to a silent courtroom, by a prosecutor who is trying a man named Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) for the murder of three teen girls. All three murders were recorded, but the location of the third recording is unknown.
Chevalier is barely a character in the film. We only ever see him sitting in a witness box, and he never speaks. Instead, we spend all of our time with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a young woman who sleeps outside the courthouse every night so that she can be assured a spot in the courtroom gallery throughout the two-month trial. There is no obvious reason for Kelly-Anne to do this; she has no connection to Chevalier, or his victims, or any of their families. When she is stopped by a reporter outside the courtroom after the first day of the trial, and asked to share why she attended, she simply says she was curious. When Kelly-Anne isn't at the courthouse, she is in her small, barely furnished apartment, where she plays online poker and cyber-stalks one of the victim's mothers on her dual-monitor PC.
Plante is wise enough not to burden Kelly-Anne's character with the obvious tropes. She's not some pale, hunched creature looking to escape her degraded life through a computer screen. She is in fact a successful fashion model. Her apartment, while bare, is gorgeous. She takes care of herself, dresses well, and is technologically savvy enough to customize and air-gap her in-home virtual assistant. She would be the coolest person in any friend group. All of this makes the question the film revolves around—Why is this beautiful, successful, normal lady doing all of this weird shit?—more unsettling. As Kelly-Anne's behavior grows more alarming, potential answers move further and further away. There is no revelation—no traumatic backstory, no secret connection to the murders—that explains Kelly-Anne's single-minded interest in the trial.
For a movie so obviously "about" many of the day's hottest social ills—loneliness, voyeurism, internet trolls, the dark web, digital thrill-seeking, desensitization to violence—Red Rooms is remarkably successful at avoiding heavy-handed didacticism. Plante never gives the impression that he is sitting in judgment of any of his characters, and there's no indication that we are supposed to feel anything in particular about them. Most of the film's action is contained in the formation and quick dissolution of a friendship between Kelly-Anne and another obsessive trial attendee, Clémentine (Laurie Babin). Clémentine is a much more obviously unstable than Kelly-Anne—she fits snugly into the mould of a quintessential, wild-eyed serial killer groupie—and Kelly-Anne knows what kind of person she's dealing with. And yet she only ever treats Clémentine with respect and kindness—listening patiently to her rants, feeding her, and giving her a place to stay. When it's eventually revealed that Kelly-Anne has copies of two of Chevalier's snuff films on her computer, and Clémentine demands to see them, Kelly-Anne takes no pleasure in acquiescing. As the two watch the first film together—Clémentine instantly reduced to tears, Kelly-Anne pained but stoic—it's not clear who is meant to be an object of disgust, and who is meant to earn our pity.
Clémentine is able to escape, at least. She abandons the trial and heads for home, leaving us alone with Kelly-Anne as her strangeness deepens. Plante wants us to feel trapped with her, and accomplishes this by constructing the movie out of scenes that unsettle not through any especially disturbing imagery, but length and composition. The camera doesn't move so much as it crawls its way through long, unbroken takes that feel as if they will never end. Several times during the movie I felt almost physically confined, like I was going to stand up and shout, "OK, enough of that!" if a scene stretched on for one second longer.
It's easy for movies that plumb themes like sadism and the human capacity to take pleasure in cruelty to devolve into performatively edgy schlock. But Plante keeps the reins tight by stuffing all of his film's horror not into a bloody image or grisly set piece, but into the allure of consumption. Eventually, it's revealed that Kelly-Anne is in pursuit of something specific and awful. It wasn't until she got what she was after that I really felt Red Rooms biting down on me. After claiming her prize, Kelly-Anne's perfect, permanently strained face fills the screen. As she receives her gratification, her face melts into a look of catharsis, and maybe even bliss.
The horror that arrived with that scene came not from anything that was happening on the screen, but from the sickly feeling it filled me with. I realized at that point that I had spent the whole movie waiting for the other shoe to drop, eagerly anticipating some crack-up, some cascade of violence that would finally give my mounting disgust somewhere to go. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted to sit through the Bad Part of the movie and be granted the freedom to forget about Kelly-Anne's story, which could never be mine.
Plante never obliges. Kelly-Anne is the only one who is offered any measure of relief, and even hers is short-lived. The satisfaction she receives only increases her hunger, and the movie goes on a little longer, with Kelly-Anne dragging us further down a self-destructive path that has no end point. She doesn't get anywhere, and never will. When the movie was finally over, I didn't feel like there was anything to do but return to the glow of my computer, in search of something else to watch. I suspect she did the same.
