Movie Review : Red Rooms (2023)
Subversive cinema had its last great cultural moment a decade ago or so when Nicolas Winding Refn's movie Drive hits theatres. It was the last time it even remotely seemed cool to think differently about familiar mainstream cinema topics like violence and death. Pascal Plante's movie Red Rooms might be too surgical and understated in order to make subversive cinema cool again, but it reminded me how great it feels not being told exactly what to feel in regards to behaviors we collectively learned to judge as deviant.
Red Rooms tells the story of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a peculiar but successful young woman who models, plays poker online and invests stocks on her own for a living. Kelly-Anne is a quite obsessive person and her latest obsession is with a string of horrible murders of teenage girls that happened on the dark web. To a point where she sleeps in front of the court house every night to make sure she has a place inside the court room for the trial of the killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) every day.
Is Kelly-Anne a victim or the perpetrator of a moral crime? That’s the question Red Rooms is interested in.
Power, Loneliness and the World Wide Web
This movie isn't some kind of voyeuristic torture porn indictment of the dark web and its evil ways like most movies about the dark web are. Although it is an element of the screenplay, Red Rooms is mostly the story of Kelly-Anne and how weird and atypical she is. She's lonely and introverted, but doesn't seem necessarily unhappy. On the contrary, she's quite successful and doesn't need Ludovic Chevalier to give meaning to her life. That’s the fascinating thing about this movie: it's kind of her own choice.
Pascal Plante uses causality and logical assumptions in this movie in order to make scenes where Juliette Gariépy is hammering away at her computer keyboard in silence completely riveting. She types something, a result come up, an emotion blooms on Kelly-Ann’s face and as the audience, you're constantly trying to piece up what she’s trying to do. Because she's the protagonist of the movie and you're fearing for her emotional well-being and whatnot. The movie prods at your values and checks what kind of person you are.
I love that. I live for movies that do that.
Although I wouldn't describe Kelly-Anne as sympathetic, Pascal Plante create a vacuum of loneliness around his protagonist which she uses the web to fend off. Aesthetic details in this movie have an overbearing importance since it's so cold and surgical. For example, the sound of Kelly-Anne's shoes squeaking against the floor while she's training at home alone is a powerful marker of her loneliness. The overpowering sound of her keyboard too. Loneliness is often defined by the sounds you don't hear when you’re with people.
That bring us to Kelly-Anne's relationship to internet, which she uses to control her environment and overstep physical boundaries like locked doors or areas under surveillance. She uses it to shape her physical existence. Only at one point in the movie she seems to lose control of herself, which is where she needs to accept that she'll have to sacrifice a part of her life to get what she wants. She's such a fascinating character. Not the kind of woman who would be happy with two kids and a mortgage.
Minimalism and the Art of Saying Just Enough
The triumph of this movie lies in its aesthetic and narrative minimalism. So many movies sabotage their own efforts by overexplaining their characters motives, but Red Rooms never tips its hand. Kelly-Anne's inner world remains herself's all the way through and is only hinted at through Juliette Gariépy's out of this world non verbal acting. She is unbelievably talented at microexpressions and compulsive gestures. She can translate emotion and character but taking avocados out of a poke bowl.
Although Red Rooms relies a LOT on Juliette Gariépy in order to work (and she more than delivers), Pascal Plante's ability to develop a relationship between his protagonist and the audience by just bouncing atypical behaviours off them and having them trying to figure out who Kelly-Anne is and what she’s gonna do is undeniable. That makes a movie that doesn't have quite a lot of physical action in there 100% unpredictable. It’s a master study in tension and restraint, which is impressive given how so young everyone involved is.
*
Red Rooms is a gem. It's an accessible film, but it's not easy by any means and required a lot of involvement from the audience, but it does pay off. I don’t believe it has theatre distribution in the US or UK yet, but it's coming out in Canadian theatres today and my friends around the world, you don't want to miss this. It's one of these movies that Dead End Follies is all about. Smart, taut, original and rebellious in its own way. It also knows what it is and never draws outside the line. Don’t miss this. Do what you must.
