Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) started life as a drama about the sort of women who befriend or become romantically attached to men accused of terrible, heinous crimes, but ended up being about something else entirely.
That initial idea is still in there, though, in the character of Clementine, a short, nervous young woman who has hitch-hiked and travelled by bus to Montreal to sit in on the trial of a man, Ludovic Chevalier, accused of kidnapping, torturing and dismembering three girls. Chevalier, adding insult to mortal injury, then sold the films shot in his “red room” on the dark web.
Alongside Clementine in the audience at the trial another woman, Kelly-Anne, a leggy, beautiful model who lives in a swish apartment, plays online poker and wins, and has re-programmed her Siri-like personal assistant to make it smarter and more secure.
The film is about her, what she’s doing at this grim event, and what she hopes to get out of it.
If it’s about people at all, that is, because Red Rooms in many respects is an exercise in conjuring dark, paranoid moodscapes, using the minimalist performance of Juliette Gariépy (who plays Kelly-Anne) as a launching pad, and piling eerie sound design, spooky score and glacially creepy camera on top. This is its strong suit.
It takes place in two venues. In the aseptic Canadian courtroom where Chevalier is being tried. He’s an impassive presence inside a glass box who does not speak, and communicates only once with a hand gesture (but what a gesture), remaining a blank screen onto which others can project themselves.
And in the apartment Kelly-Anne returns to each evening, to eat, order her life – working two computer screens and voice commands to her computer assistant at the same time – and using her mastery of hacking to conduct her strange campaign to… what? Find Chevalier guilty? Get him set free? Find some dirt on the dead girls’ mothers? We’re never really certain, though Gariépy’s mildly amused eyebrow is suggesting early on that there’s something not entirely benign about Kelly-Anne.
It’s in her dealings with Clementine that this becomes abjectly clear. Clementine is the sort of idiot Pascal Plante set out to lambast when he first conceived the film but in the end he’s gone easy on her and so does Laurie Babin, the actor playing Clementine as gullible and misguided, a touch lost in the world, perhaps, and seeking significance from something of import.
The third significant woman in this is Francine, mother of one of the murdered girls, who has to sit in court while the recordings of the killings are played back. In a tough role, because so circumscribed, Elisabeth Locas plays Francine as a familiar figure – undone with grief, convinced of Chevalier’s guilt, and regarding the trial as a farce. In a speech to the ever-hovering TV cameras, she makes clear that she sees the women who cosy up to men like Chevalier as spitting on the graves of the dead girls.
This is a world of surveillance – the girls watched and recorded as they died, the TV cameras outside the courtroom, the always-on personal assistant listening out for its name to be called, the online world which Kelly-Anne roams at night.
Cool and paranoid in the extreme, distressing at times, this is not a film you walk away from feeling better about the world. But it has a raw power that’s undeniable, performances that are powerful too, and Plante even conjures scenes of real thrillerish tension, especially towards the end where Kelly-Anne believes she has tracked down one of the snuff movies made by Chevalier and bids for it in an online auction on one screen while playing poker on another screen to raise the money to cover her bids. Brilliant, precise and intense, it’s a heist movie done with one face, two screens and some clicks of a mouse.
Kelly-Anne’s poker face is what it’s about in the end. What’s behind it? A psychopath? A broken woman? A monster? You’ll watch right to the end.
Red Rooms – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
