Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
Though spooky season isn’t quite in full swing, the summer was long enough (at least here in Chicago) that the hint of a crisp breeze has sent many running to their sweaters, cups of cocoa, and the sweetly sour embrace of horror movies. While October’s column will focus more thoroughly on the genre, as will much of Paste’s movie coverage in general, I’d be remiss if I skipped over a nasty little Canadian movie that quietly opened last week. Considering that this week sees the release of Speak No Evil, an underwhelming and defanged remake of a film which reveled in its sociopathic torture of a polite nuclear family, it only makes sense to highlight Red Rooms, a movie whose fangs are disturbingly well-maintained.
Red Rooms is a movie fixated on a single performance, itself fixated on a serial killer. The performance is that of Juliette Gariépy, fantastic as the unblinking Kelly-Anne. The serial killer is the Gollum-like and dead-eyed Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of butchering three young girls live on a pay-per-view stream. This dark web snuff stream is a Red Room, and it’s unclear what aspect of the case Kelly-Anne is obsessed with as she stares intently in the background of the film’s gripping courtroom scenes.
Is she another romanticizing rubbernecker here to ogle real deaths as true-crime entertainment? Or is it darker? Is she—like her trial-observing counterpart Clémentine (Laurie Babin, excelling at a more emotive, girlish foil)—a hybristophilic fangirl, a prison groupie who’d send a love letter to Ted Bundy? These questions, and the complexity that lies underneath, drive Red Rooms beyond the effectively daunting way writer/director Pascal Plante reveals the details of the central crimes.
And, without ever showing too much, Plante has crafted one hell of a stomachache. He doesn’t show, and he barely tells. The little we do glean only adds to the dreadful realism. Less than two hours, yet feeling like an eternity thanks to some well-planned and executed long takes (featuring some particularly engaging monologues from Natalie Tannous, playing the prosecutor), Red Rooms traps us in the mindset of its intense lead as we get ever more involved with the case.
Kelly-Anne is a model, a line of work where possessing a certain inscrutable blankness and malleability is an asset. Many shots are exclusively filled with her face, straight on, unwavering. She’s as methodical as a girl with a dragon tattoo, in a movie as mechanical and glib as a David Fincher production. She plays online poker, pounds smoothies, does cardio and digs further into the killings in her spartan high-rise apartment; she spends her nights camped out on the street so she’s be first in line for the next day of the trial. Everything is planned, scheduled, coordinated. Plante unevenly doles out the details of her life, but Gariépy lets us know who she is immediately with a long, unflinching stare. The only question is how her particular flavor of inhumanity relates to that of Ludovic.
That question is never fully answered, though Red Rooms’ interesting techno-realism, bringing something like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer into the age of Tor and Bitcoin, assures us that losing your humanity is becoming easier all the time. Exploiting the surveillance state—especially notable and bleak in the cold, hard lines of downtown Montreal—requires a bit of sociopathic social engineering; Kelly-Anne’s online abilities are so impressive, it’s no surprise when they bleed out into the flesh-and-blood world. These scenes err on the side of explanation rather than thematic line-blurring, which can sometimes detract from the otherwise pervasive uneasiness surrounding the brutal murders that keep threatening to give you a nightmare for the rest of your life.
Speaking of, one of Plante’s greatest horror tricks—unflashy and rated PG—comes courtesy of a single look and one of the best uses of a film score I’ve heard in ages. The sound design throughout is, to say the least, thoroughly upsetting, but I didn’t realize how little the music intruded until it was unavoidably intrusive.
Though the movie may leave you scratching your head a bit at the “why” of its characters, Red Rooms’ great strength is that of so many horror movies: alongside the lingering questions is a disgusting, slimy film you just can’t shake. Much like Longlegs, one of the year’s best horror movies, Red Rooms poisons the atmosphere, and you can feel its traumatic events coating your skin long after watching. That’s a testament to Plante’s impressive construction and to Gariépy’s entrancing abilities, which push the ambiguity over the edge from “frustrating” to “compelling.” It’s a truly unpleasant watch, but for some horror enthusiasts, that’s all part of the fun. If you want to head to Halloween a little early, Red Rooms is a rewardingly masochistic way to do so.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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