Red Rooms explores one of the darkest subjects of any movie I've seen. Yet it handles it in a way that is incredibly sensitive and insightful. This isn't Hostel. It takes a scandalously horrific premise and uses it as an indictment of our voyeuristic culture, and one that implicates its audience, an audience that often is drawn to true crime and, by extension, the suffering of others. It explores being drawn to violence and darkness using an extreme scenario. And it plays with a protagonist we do not want to identify with. Red Rooms terrified me more than I expected.
I appreciated the way the film never exploited its premise with an attempt to titillate with gore or sensationalism. It kept the horribleness off screen with only some suggestion of it. Plante films his story partly as courtroom drama, a method of explaining much without having to experience it visually. Yet he does so quite grippingly. Despite not seeing any of the violence, we still feel the horror of it painfully.
But there is horror we do witness, the actions of our protagonist which is amplified by the film's aloofness to her motives and emotions. It is watching Kelly-Anne which is the most upsetting. We can understand Clementine and her groupie like fascination, even if we don't condone her position. But Kelly-Anne, her coldness, and her steely resolve are difficult to wrap our understandings around. Plante expertly builds tension and suspense even as we abhor our protagonist. Watching her is terrifying yet we can't look away.
And the end is something to behold. It gives us both some peace while planting something insidiously worrying in our minds. Is Kelly-Anne hero or villain? Perhaps both. How does our cultural fascination with horrible crimes connect us to her or are we more like Clementine? The thought that we could live in a world where people commit such atrocities is one horror but that we live in a world where some are fascinated by them is perhaps even worse. Red Rooms makes us contemplate all of it and in so doing is one of the scarier movies I've seen.
Les Chambres Rouge/Red Rooms
Starring: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos
Writer/Director: Pascal Plante
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