“You get what you deserve”: How Red Rooms (2023) Provides a Chilling Takedown of True Crime

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Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is a movie about sickos. But it’s less about the sickos committing the crimes than about the ones drawn to consuming crime as entertainment. It’s about the true crime obsessive whose palpable obsessiveness borders on psychosexual fixation. Our media environment is flush with popular documentaries, television shows, podcasts, and nonfiction books that detail grisly crimes in disgusting detail. Therefore, it is a ripe time to interrogate true crime and the (many) people who consume it. However, Red Rooms is not just interrogation. It’s also an indictment. The film is a savage takedown of a prurient nature that reduces real-life victims to mere corpses and transforms serial killers into legendary figures. It’s also one of the most disturbing movies of recent years.

A French-Canadian feature released in late 2023 in Quebec that went under the radar until American critics discovered it in late 2024, Red Rooms is not particularly visceral or explicit, in spite of my comment about its profound ability to disturb. The film centres on a trial of a fictional serial killer in Montreal. In the opening scene, which is an extended sequence in the courtroom, we learn the details of the case. The killer kidnapped teenage girls and live streamed their murders for paying viewers in so-called “red rooms” on the dark web. We hear the opening statements from both the prosecution and the defense. It’s an intensive scene that establishes a credible reality while also establishing the film’s obsessive, restrained visual vocabulary. The camera pans, zooms, and tilts around the room, constantly moving in a fluid motion, rarely cutting. The camera establishes the geography of the space and draws our attention to one person and then another in the room, from the lawyers to the mothers of the victims to the killer himself, who sits absentmindedly behind thick glass.

Plante’s camera also observes Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) watching from the public gallery in the back. At first a mere background figure, she catches our attention due to her stillness. Her gaze is fixed, and we notice she is not watching the lawyers or the camera: she’s watching the killer. Despite staying a background reality, Kelly-Anne’s stare quickly becomes unnerving and it clues us into the entire perverted perspective of this true crime obsessive. As I often remark, both in articles on this site and while talking on 3 Brothers Filmcast, opening scenes in films are instructive in not only establishing the core visual and thematic interests of a film, but also in teaching you how to watch them. Following this logic, the opening scene of Red Rooms becomes instructional: this is a movie about observing crime, not about the crime itself, per se. It is about the act of watching more than the act of killing.

Right from these opening moments, we know that Kelly-Anne is not well. The film gives us scant details of her life, revealing all of its information visually. We learn she’s a fashion model as she goes to photoshoots on weekends. We observe that she has no friends, family, or romantic interests, as she spends her evenings alone in her apartment, researching the case on her computer. And we see her spend each day at the trial, sleeping in an alleyway near the courthouse so she can wake at dawn and be one of the first people in line to secure one of the few seats in the gallery.

This ritual causes her to meet Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who also obsessively attends the trial each day. Unlike Kelly-Anne, Clémentine is sociable, gregarious, and she’s more than happy to tell others why. She thinks the killer is innocent and so attends the trial as a groupie, the kind of which has been common since the days of Charles Manson. Red Rooms contrasts the two women, who are both obsessed with these crimes yet for different reasons. Plante uses them as a means to examine the twin poles of true crime fandom: those who are obsessed with the crimes and those who are obsessed with the killer.

It’s easy to be more repulsed by Clémentine’s viewpoint, one that is obviously driven by not only insecurity but psychosexual attraction—her remarking on the killer’s kind eyes, which are obviously vacant and inhuman, made to look like a shark’s in the film’s close-ups, is particularly gross. But it soon becomes clear that Kelly-Anne’s is the more troubling approach. At least Clémentine is driven by an admiration of something she recognizes as human, even if she has to distort reality to justify her affection for said human. Kelly-Anne is more obsessed with the crimes themselves, never seeming to care that there are real people involved in this case, rather fixated on the details of how the girls were killed and what happened to the videos of their murders. It is the difference between a twisted humanity and a lack of humanity.

These videos are the haunted objects at the film’s centre and the special objects of pursuit for the characters. They are referred to in nauseatingly oblique detail, often threatened upon the viewer, but never shown to us, rather wielded as the most horrifying things to ever exist. But we don’t need to see them. Red Rooms rather brilliantly weaponizes what we see and don’t see and when. It parcels out the videos at the film’s centre, relying exclusively on discussion of and then audio from the videos in place of the visuals. The approach is all the more sickening for its restraint.

Another of the film’s standout sequences comes a little over midway through, after we learn (through observation) that Kelly-Anne has two of the three murder videos in her possession. Clémentine finds this out and asks to watch them. And Kelly-Anne agrees, rather quickly. Kelly-Anne has Clémentine over to her sparse apartment and plays them on her dual-monitor set-up. Unleashing the sound of chainsaws, screamings, and tearing flesh is the closest the film ever comes to being an exploitation film, but crucially, Plante never cuts to footage of the videos. He never needs to. The sound is sickening, and even worse, we have to watch Clémentine and Kelly-Anne watch the videos. The shot is a simple close-up two-shot of the women’s faces bathed in red light from the computer screen. We are drawn to Clémentine’s face as her excitement quickly turns to fear and then disgust and then terror. But as in the opening scene, Kelly-Anne’s face becomes more disturbing. It’s implacable. It’s stolid. It’s calm. She seems unfazed by what is terrifying Clémentine and by extension us. What kind of person is this, we think. How can her heart not break at even comprehending what these girls had to endure? Red Rooms gives us a troubling answer to these questions.

In the aftermath of this sequence, Clémentine fades from the film’s focus and the plot turns its attention to the fabled video of a third murder, which has never been seen and remains an object of great interest on the dark web. We also get more snippets of Kelly-Anne’s professional life as her obsession with the case threatens to overwhelm everything else, culminating in one of the most perverse courtroom scenes ever put to film. Plante’s only missteps come late in the film as he pursues some form of narrative resolution that isn’t necessary in a work that is so sickening partially due to its weaponized ambiguity.

Red Rooms is a true downer, the sort of film that is so perverse in its plotting yet so reserved in its form that it strikes a profound chord with a certain subset of cinephiles. There’s enormous credit to a movie that recalls the original The Vanishing (1988) in the best, most unsettling ways. But I’m more drawn to how Red Rooms manages to reverse some of the worst impulses of true crime. So much true crime transforms real, human victims into mere objects of morbid entertainment. Red Rooms treats fictional victims with sympathy and horror at their death, acting as if they’re real human beings. This disparity effectively scolds the entire true crime industry. If a fictional movie about horrific crimes can treat the dead as human beings and have the restraint to withhold the details of their murders from us, then what excuse do true crime documentaries and podcasts have? Red Rooms gives us a clear, troubling answer.

Red Rooms (2023, Canada)

Written and directed by Pascal Plante; starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurin Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Shagnon, Guy Thauvette.

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