Pascal Plante’s thoroughly disturbing Red Rooms takes the over-saturated true crime courtroom drama and gives it a fresh, surreal twist to create something utterly horrifying. Red Rooms tells the story of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a model who becomes obsessed with the high-profile case of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). As her reality blurs with her morbid fantasies, Kelly-Anne turns to the dark web, where she searches for the missing video of the murder of a young girl, to whom Kelly-Anne bears a disturbing resemblance.
Red Rooms is a bleak look at how judicial systems often don’t hold people accountable for their crimes while damning women and girls to be killed, as well as pointing out the grim way in which our media and true crime ‘fans’ often turn monsters into celebrity figures. This, twinned with the traditional horror elements of Red Rooms, makes the terror of the picture work on two levels and the result is a nightmarish trip that you won’t forget in a hurry.
Pascal handles the crimes in a truly unique fashion for true crime films, forcing audiences to sit with their imaginations as we hear descriptions of the horrors the victims went through via brief snippets of conversations. But the lack of gratuitous gore and crime scene photos doesn’t detract from the disturbing elements of the film, with Gariépy delivering a gripping performance as the obsessive lead Kelly-Anne, and McCabe-Lokos possesses an eerie quality as the passive serial killer, seemingly unbothered by the charges against him.
RED ROOMS is in UK cinemas from September 6th.
