Red Rooms

Red Rooms
Film poster
French	Les chambres rouges
Directed by	Pascal Plante
Written by	Pascal Plante
Produced by	Dominique Dussault
Starring	Juliette Gariépy Laurie Babin Maxwell McCabe-Lokos
Cinematography	Vincent Biron
Edited by	Jonah Malak
Music by	Dominique Plante
Production company	Nemesis Films
Distributed by	Entract Films
Release date	July 4, 2023 (2023-07-04) (KVIFF)
Running time	118 minutes[1]
Country	Canada
Languages	French English
Box office	$118,103[2]

Red Rooms (French: Les chambres rouges) is a 2023 Canadian psychological thriller film written and directed by Pascal Plante.^[3]

The film stars Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Charlotte Aubin, Guy Thauvette, Frédérick De Grandpré, Pierre Chagnon, Elisabeth Locas, Natalie Tannous, Sébastien Beaulac, Rebecca Makonnen, Maxim Martin, Richard Turcotte, Stanley Hilaire and Marie-Gabrielle Ménard.

The film's production was first announced in November 2022.^[4]

The film premiered at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on July 4, 2023,^[5] and had its Canadian premiere as the opening film of the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival.^[6] It opened commercially on August 11.

In Montreal, Canada, fashion model Kelly-Anne attends the trial of an accused murder Ludovic Chevalier who broadcast the killing of three young women. Chevalier is accused of doing so via a "Red Room", an urban legend of live murders being broadcast on the Tor network. He pleads not-guilty and appears unaffected in court.

After the first day at trial, Kelly-Anne begins to dig at the case, and sees that the mother of one victim, Camille Beaulieu, has her email credentials exposed on the dark web. She is then able to log in to the mother's email and find her Wi-Fi password to her home, having already found her address via news footage.

While Kelly-Anne is outside the courthouse waiting in line, she meets Clementine, who is fixated on Chevalier being innocent. Clementine and Kelly-Anne become friendly, but they are very different. Clementine spent most of her money coming to Montreal from a small town over a hundred kilometers away, and is obsessed with Chevalier to the point of delusion. Kelly-Anne speaks little about the case and pays strict attention to her looks and her strictly regulated diet. She explains to Clementine that she is able to afford her high-rise apartment by online gambling.

Kelly-Anne also shows Clementine her digital assistant, Guinevere. Kelly-Anne explains that the AI and Wikipedia learning that these digital assistants have are data loggers, and she has custom fitted hers so it can't be hacked.

Clementine starts to stay at Kelly-Anne's apartment. One night, Clementine calls into a late-night TV show, where they are calling Chevalier a murderer and saying he should be killed. The TV hosts call her crazy and Kelly-Anne consoles her by buying her things and teaching her racquetball, which is Kelly-Anne's way to relax.

The trial progresses and the two are there daily, until the videos of the killings are to be played in court. The judge explains that only the jury and the families will be allowed to view the first two victims’ videos, and that the final video of victim Camille Beaulieu is unavailable. Outside the court room, Clementine becomes suspicious of Kelly-Anne when she mentions details from the videos, and demands to see the footage once she realizes Kelly-Anne has access to it. Despite her reservations, Kelly-Anne shows her the videos, which are so jarring that Clementine falls into a state of shock, jarred by the content and Kelly-Anne’s emotionless response to it. She stops attending the trial and returns home, ending her friendship with Kelly-Anne.

Kelly-Anne continues to dig into the case and enters a mysterious chat room where she is told she must "prove" herself before a live bidding.

Kelly-Anne goes on to visits Camille Beaulieu's home, accessing her Wi-Fi and her smart home locks. After this, she becomes more and more paranoid that she is being watched.

Before one of her photoshoots, Kelly-Anne receives a call from her manager saying her client canceled, and that while she tried to defend her, Kelly-Anne’s behavior with regard to the trial had been too edgy and bizarre. She becomes obsessed with victim Camille Beaulieu, even dressing as her to court in her school dress and donning fake braces. The accused murderer Chevalier moves for the first time in front of the court, looks at her, and waves good-bye.

Her modeling manager calls to break her contract over the courtroom stunt, and Kelly-Anne goes back to the chat room and says she is finally "ready." After confirming her identity, they tell her that bidding will be the following night. As she prepares for the bidding, she becomes increasingly paranoid and feels scared that someone is following her home. It is revealed that the item being auctioned is the snuff film of the final victim, Camille Beaulieu. Kelly-Anne drains all her Bitcoin stocks and begins playing a final game of poker on the dark web to get more money in preparation for the bid. The bidding starts, and quickly becomes feverishly high, pushing Kelly-Anne to put all her Bitcoin into the poker game, where she wins enough to make the final bid, ending the auction. To alleviate the stress of the bid, she tries to ask Guinevere to tell her a joke. The joke it chooses makes Kelly-Anne feel paranoid, and she destroys the device.

The snuff film appears on her desktop and after finally watching it, she begins to completely dissociate. She wears the blonde wig and costume from court, and after tapping her apartment complex’s security cameras, leaves her apartment and goes to Camille Beaulieu's home. Inside, she poses on the victim’s bed while taking pictures of herself. She then leaves a flash drive on the nightstand of the victim's mother.

In the final shots of the movie, we see a TV news recording that an anonymous source gave the footage of the final victim's murder, wherein the court was able to further identify Chevalier as the murderer. Chevalier changes his plea to guilty. The news then goes to a never-before-seen interview with a "ex-groupie", which is Clementine. She says she is unable to understand how she was so blind and only wishes the best for the victims' families.

• Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne
• Laurie Babin as Clémentine
• Elisabeth Locas as Francine Beaulieu
• Maxwell McCabe-Lokos as Ludovic Chevalier
• Natalie Tannous
• Pierre Chagnon
• Guy Thauvette as Judge Marcel Godbout

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 46 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8/10. The website's consensus reads: "Anchored by Juliette Gariépy's superb portrayal of self-destructive obsession, Red Rooms is a haunting and timely trip down a particularly morbid rabbit hole."^[7] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 82 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[8]

• Red Rooms at IMDb