Red Rooms

We’ve reached a point in our cultural consumption where the "Serial Killer Trial" is basically our version of the Super Bowl. You see it on TikTok, you hear it in the endless drone of true-crime podcasts, and you feel it in the way people treat real-life tragedy as a bingeable season of television. Red Rooms (Les Chambres rouges) takes that societal itch—the one that makes us want to look at the car crash—and turns it into a clinical, ice-cold descent into a digital hellscape.

I watched this on a Tuesday evening while my neighbor was outside loudly pressure-washing his driveway; the relentless, high-pressure hum of the water actually blended perfectly with the movie’s synth-heavy, oppressive score. It made the whole experience feel like I was being scrubbed raw, which is exactly how Pascal Plante’s film is designed to make you feel.

The Girl in the Glass Box

The film follows Kelly-Anne, played by a terrifyingly focused Juliette Gariépy. She’s a high-fashion model who lives in a minimalist, high-rise apartment in Montreal that looks more like a server farm than a home. She’s wealthy, tech-savvy, and utterly obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man accused of filming the brutal murders of three teenage girls and selling the footage on the dark web.

What makes Kelly-Anne so fascinating—and deeply unsettling—is that she isn't your typical "final girl" or even a traditional protagonist. She’s a predator in her own right. She sleeps on the sidewalk to be first in line for the courtroom every morning. She doesn't just want justice; she wants the one piece of evidence that has never been found: the video of the third murder.

Juliette Gariépy gives a performance that feels like watching a coiled snake. She barely blinks. When she encounters Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a naive girl who is convinced Chevalier is innocent and being "framed by the system," the contrast is jarring. Clémentine is the emotional, loud-mouthed fan-girl we’re used to seeing in news cycles. Kelly-Anne, however, is something new. She is the personification of the dark web: silent, efficient, and harboring secrets that would make a normal person’s blood turn to slush.

A Thriller of Absence

Most films dealing with "Red Rooms"—the urban legend of live-streamed torture—rely on cheap gore and "torture porn" tropes. Pascal Plante is much smarter than that. He understands that the most frightening thing is what the human mind fills in when the screen goes black. The film is remarkably bloodless, yet it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in years.

The horror is found in the audio. In one sequence, the courtroom listens to the leaked audio of one of the murders. The camera stays fixed on Kelly-Anne’s face for what feels like an eternity. We don’t see the violence; we see her listening to it. We see the way her pupils dilate. It’s a masterclass in directorial restraint. Pascal Plante trusts his audience to be horrified by the implication rather than the image.

True crime obsession isn't a hobby anymore; it’s a form of high-functioning psychopathy that we’ve collectively decided is socially acceptable. This film is the first one I’ve seen that truly captures that. It doesn't judge the audience directly, but it makes you feel like an accomplice for even wanting to know what happens next.

The Modern Digital Gothic

The film feels intensely "now." It captures the specific loneliness of the 2020s—the way we can be surrounded by millions of people online while sitting in a cold, dark room illuminated only by three monitors. Kelly-Anne’s obsession is fueled by "Bitcoins," "The Onion Router," and encrypted chat rooms. It treats technology not as a gimmick, but as the actual architecture of the characters' souls.

The cinematography by Vincent Biron uses a palette of bruising purples and surgical blues. Everything feels sterile, which makes the outbursts of emotion from the victims’ mother, Francine Beaulieu (Élisabeth Locas), feel like a physical assault. When the trial finally reaches its climax, the movie takes a turn into a psychological thriller that left me clutching my armrests.

The box office for this film was tragically small, likely because it’s a French-language Canadian film about a deeply uncomfortable subject. But in an era where we are drowning in disposable streaming content, Red Rooms stands out as a monolith. It’s a film that demands you look at it, even when you desperately want to turn away.

Red Rooms is a chilling reminder of why we shouldn't stare too long into the abyss, especially if that abyss is behind a paywall on the dark web. It’s a film about the cost of looking and the terrifying vacuum that exists where human empathy used to be. Juliette Gariépy is a revelation, and if there were any justice in the industry, she’d be a massive star based on this role alone. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an essential one for anyone who wants to understand the darker corners of our modern, hyper-connected world.