Rating: NR | Runtime: 118 minutes
Release Date: August 11th, 2023 (Canada) / September 6th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Entract Films / Utopia
Director(s): Pascal Plante
Writer(s): Pascal Plante

Why are you here?

It takes seventy-five minutes for Clementine (Laurie Babin) to finally ask this question that we’ve been desperate to have answered since the beginning of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms.

A lot happens in that time to make the query more relevant than ever due to the discovery that Kelly-Anne’s (Juliette Gariépy) stoicism in the face of a trial that contains horrific truths is real. She’s not a groupie like Clementine—blindly believing the system has persecuted Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) and set him up for the grisly live-streamed murders of three teenage girls. As Kelly-Anne admits with a blank stare when interviewed by a newscaster, she’s merely curious. About the crime itself? Maybe. About how the crime was committed and discovered? Definitely.

Because Kelly-Anne is very tech-savvy. Rather than avoid liabilities like AI personal assistants, she makes sure to insulate her use of them from prying eyes. How? By knowing how to exploit their back doors and infiltrate the lives of regular folk who trust too much in the promise of convenience over safety. Kelly-Anne is so proficient (and sociopathic in her lifestyle) that it’s easier to think her fascination in this case is about how to better protect her own crimes than it is caring about whichever way the verdict goes. It’s not necessarily a game to her, but it is a show.

What she cannot anticipate, however, is letting Clementine get close. A bona fide sycophant in need of help, this young woman concocts the most outrageous conspiracy theories to ensure her baseless delusions don’t fall apart. Not to say that there isn’t a chance Chevalier may be innocent (the prosecution is tasked with proving he’s guilty beyond all reasonable doubt). Clementine simply refuses to believe the opposite. And why not? The most damning evidence in this trial comes from recorded snuff films found on the dark web. It’s easy to imagine what you want when there’s no way to be refuted beyond conjecture.

Kelly-Anne doesn’t take a shine in Clementine because they are kindred spirits, though. The latter is a raw nerve—all emotions, all the time. If anything, Kelly-Anne pities her at first and seeks to teach her the means of coping with them later. The result, of course, is that her mask begins to slip. Rather than being able to hide behind her screens and AI assistant playing online poker and hacking into the accounts of the victims’ parents, Kelly-Anne suddenly finds a human connection. She begins to care. Become protective. And, when her pragmatic outlook on this case isn’t matched, angry. That’s when mistakes happen.

What’s so captivating about Plante’s Red Rooms is that we can’t know if Kelly-Anne is actually making mistakes. That was my initial read in the moment once the last twenty-five or so minutes start to unravel. The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if her paranoia wasn’t about getting caught. Maybe it was about ensuring she didn’t go too far down the rabbit hole before those on her trail could catch her. Because Kelly-Anne is too smart to not know what she’s doing. Whether her plan was to secure the missing piece of this puzzle from the beginning or not, it is by the end. And “getting caught” doesn’t necessarily mean being caught. Not when we’re talking about 1s and 0s.

It’s a stunning tightrope walk that expertly weaves together a taut script, sensory overload (via very intentional and effective cinematography and score), and an enigmatic performance from Gariépy. She’s the most crucial part as her poker face leads us to believe nothing she does is impulsive. Kelly-Anne is methodically building a nest egg through clandestine means augmented by an extremely public career that must be taken into consideration when the time to push all her chips in arrives. Eventually that sterile condo and her crazy courtroom stunt make perfect sense together. Because to catch a ghost, one must become a ghost too. Sometimes that means becoming invisible. Sometimes it demands you cause a fright.

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Juliette Gariépy in RED ROOMS; courtesy of Nemesis Films.