‘Red Rooms’ Lives in the Space Between Observation and Obsession

Red Rooms tackles the perils of parasocial relationships and serial-killer fanaticism with an icky yet invasive fascination.

Red Rooms was one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. Since I had heard good things about it online, I went out of my way to check it out at a local theater, and it was definitely worth the extra effort! It immediately flew up my ranked list of new releases from the year to a spot in the top three.

The movie follows model/online gambler/hacker Kelly-Anne as she attends the trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a man being charged with recording and posting snuff films online of the murder of three young girls between the ages of 13 and 17. While I believe this phrase tends to be a bit hyperbolic when it comes to movies and only leads to disappointment: at no point in this film will you ever be able to tell what is coming next.

This article will discuss spoilers for the movie, so if you haven’t seen it yet, I would recommend going in blind so you can experience the same sickly nightmare of a time that I did.

Red Rooms resonated with me as a perversion of the detective archetype in classic mystery stories. Kelly-Anne has the same emotional detachment and specialized intellect as a Sherlockian detective. She focuses on something and cannot get it out of her mind until it is complete, and she does not seem to have any regard for how she makes the people around her feel during the process; hurting them is part of her game, just like the online poker rooms she constantly finds herself in. Just like those detectives, she doesn’t desire payment or credit for her work. 

Unlike them, however, she doesn’t possess their codes of ethics; Sherlock may disguise himself in pursuit of a case to gain information, but Kelly-Anne does the same in what seems more like wish fulfillment, a creepy sort of enthusiasm the viewer never sees from her on any other occasion. The detective is thus not necessarily the objective truth teller we typically see: our detective may not be someone we can trust at all, one driven by self-serving desires that we can never understand because she does not allow us or anyone else into her mind.

Perhaps this is why the film's cinematography feels like an exercise in surveillance. As the audience, we are often given the perspective of security cameras wherever Kelly-Anne is. We at least watch her take note of them wherever she goes. When we aren’t given these voyeuristic glances into her life and the lives of people around her or watching the camera move mechanically around a courtroom, we are often focused directly on her face—or, rather, her eyes. Watching and being watched are core tenets of this film and Kelly-Anne as a character. One scene that encapsulates this is a split diopter shot that appears midway through the film; it focuses both on a livestream being projected and the eyes of the person watching it. As viewers, we’re never shown the content of the snuff films, only the characters’ reactions as they play out before them, whether it be tears, passing out, or gleeful celebration.

In a way, Red Rooms explores the ethical values of watching or being watched. Can there be something good about sitting back and watching something bad happen? When you watch a snuff film over and over and over again, is it truly possible that your only motivation was justice, or must there be some level of obsessiveness to it?

This line between obsessiveness and justice seems to be in clear reference to the consumption of true crime content online: fans constantly recount the grisly deaths of real people, try to pick up and solve cases that have gone long cold, and even fall in love with serial killers, and each of these people are called out for their behaviors throughout this movie’s runtime. There is a solid line between voyeurism and justice, and Kelly-Anne spends the whole runtime of the movie toeing it, only swerving one way or the other in a few of the film’s best scenes. The viewer is constantly wondering what her intentions are, and I think the fact that we never really find out makes it even stronger.

In what is possibly the movie’s most disturbing scene, Kelly-Anne quite literally parades around in a costume of a mother’s dead daughter, Camille, puts on her wig and pretends to be her, and even breaks into her bedroom to mimic the pose she did in the very last photo ever taken of her before her brutal murder. Does turning the snuff video over to Camille’s mother absolve her of this, especially when they might have arrested Chevalier anyway? If a young adult goes online and brings up someone else’s dead child, trying to solve a case long abandoned, does this actually help those who survive the victim, or does it just reanimate a corpse that had already been grieved, over and over and over? 

The film's ending is perfectly emblematic of this invasive justice; Camille’s mother wakes up one day to a flash drive that she has never seen before on her nightstand. This flash drive will change her life for the better—it will get her daughter’s killer put in jail—but how did it get here? Who walked up her stairs, through her living room? Who looked over her while she slept? It’s justice, sure, but it is also unquestionably a violation, and this movie forces you to sit in the uncomfortable middle ground throughout its entire runtime.

Another feature of the movie that helps elevate this discomfort is the score. It is oftentimes discordant and, at key moments, terrifying. Toward the beginning of the movie, the prosecutor of Chevalier’s trial discusses how she felt after she first saw the snuff films posted of two of the young girls; she tells the jury how every night, every time she closes her eyes, she is haunted by the images she saw, by their screams. There is one moment in the movie where I’m almost convinced the music intentionally mimicked the sound of this screaming, making the scene something right out of a nightmare.

The cast of the film is also wonderful. Gariépy nails Kelly-Anne’s impassivity terrifyingly well—by the end of the movie, I was nervous and tense just watching her stand there and catch her breath for a few seconds, not knowing what was going to come next, and that’s just a testament to how chilling her performance was—and Laurie Babin’s character Clementine, a fangirl of Chevalier, really brings a sense of charm and whimsy, making Kelly-Anne seem all the more disturbing in comparison.

While other movies have shamed the viewer for watching (i.e. Funny Games as a famous example), Red Rooms serves as more of a warning than anything else about how consuming true crime content or becoming obsessed with real, existing people can be disrespectful if not outright frightening to those around you. Do see it in theaters if you can because the score is something to marvel at.

★★★★★

9.4 out of 10

Check out Red Rooms in theaters.