Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges) is a 2023 French-Canadian film written and directed by Pascal Plante. It's about a mysterious model, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) who becomes obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man accused of torturing and murdering three schoolgirls and distributing the videos online in Quebec.
Tropes:
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: Kelly-Anne makes a lot of money playing playing high-stakes poker. At one crucial moment, she goes all-in, bluffing with a risky wager of 21 bitcoins. Depending on the then-current exchange rate in 2022, this would have been worth up to $1 million.
- Amateur Sleuth: Kelly-Anne is doing her own investigation into the Red Rooms murders.
- Ambiguously Evil: Good luck trying to figure out Kelly-Anne's personal morality. She seems to have been working to convict Chevalier the entire time, but she's clearly driven by her own compulsions and not sympathy for his victims. Her actions are attention-grabbing but deeply traumatizing to the victims' families and it's implied she keeps a copy of his final snuff film.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Camille's mother said she wouldn't rest until she learned what happened to her daughter. Kelly-Anne leaves her a thumb drive with her daughter's snuff film on it and it's highly likely the poor woman watches it before she gives it to the police.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Kelly-Anne is pursuing a monstrous serial killer, but her own morality is quite suspect. She's using illegal means of investigation, is unconcerned about the effects of her actions on the victims' families, and is clearly motivated by her own compulsions rather than any sympathy for the victims.
- Black Market: The film explores the Dark Web's underground economy, where human suffering is commodified into a gruesome spectacle for wealthy viewers. Kelly-Anne becomes obsessed with bidding on "red room" livestreams - real-time torture sessions sold to the highest bidder - demonstrating how the anonymity of cryptocurrency and encrypted networks enable moral depravity to thrive.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: When Kelly-Anne is being dragged out of the courtroom for dressing like Camille, the film cuts to her POV looking at Chevalier, who looks directly into the camera as he notices Kelly-Anne. The moment his eyes lock with hers (and the viewer's), a musical crescendo and horrible screaming hit the soundtrack.
- Broken Pedestal: Clementine is clearly projecting onto Chevalier, believing him to be a good, honest man being framed. When Kelly-Anne shows her the snuff films, Clementine is shattered and loses all admiration for Chevalier.
- Catholic School Girls Rule: Played for horror. Chevalier's last victim is a high school student, Camille, who was kidnapped (and presumably murdered) in her school uniform. At the climax of her obsession, Kelly-Anne wears a somewhat revealing school uniform to court and makes sure that Chevalier sees her, getting thrown out and devastating Camille's already-grieving family.
- Creepy Loner Girl: Kelly-Anne has a privileged existence because she's very intelligent and beautiful, but she has no friends or family. She obsesses over the Chevalier trial, has an extremely rigid and structured life, and is only ever shown speaking to her agent or Clementine, who is a more overt example of an Ineffectual Loner from a rough background, while Kelly-Anne isn't given such an easy explanation.
- Cruel to Be Kind: It's suggested that Kelly-Anne plays the Snuff Film for Clementine so that Clementine will realize Chevalier is guilty and go home, which is what happens.
- Cunning People Play Poker: Kelly-Anne is suggested to be very intelligent and, while she makes money from modeling, her Infinite Supplies are implied to come from the high-stakes poker games she bets on.
- Dissonant Serenity: During the trial, when horrible atrocities are being discussed, the camera often lingers on Chevalier looking extremely bored: fidgeting with his nails, smoothing his pant legs, and hunching over in his seat.
- The Ending Changes Everything: Deconstructed. The movie asks how much the ending does change anything. Kelly-Anne has secured Chevalier's conviction, and seems to have been working towards that goal all along. However, her behavior is still shown to have been deeply traumatizing for the victims' families and, while Kelly-Anne has secured Chevalier's conviction, it was likely he would have been found guilty already. Does the end justifies the means or not?
- Everyone Has Standards: During the climax, after she successfully bids on the final snuff film featuring Camille, the AI that Kelly-Anne programmed seems to chastise her for doing so.
- Everything Is Online: Kelly-Anne is able to do her entire investigation online and even uses entirely digital resources to find the Beaulieu household and create a digital keycard for the front door.
- Firing Day: Kelly-Anne's modeling agency informs her she's been fired from a shoot due to being seen at Chevalier's trial as a "fangirl." While her agent tells her to take some time off, Kelly-Anne soon does even worse and the agency severs ties with her permanently.
- Foil: Clementine is short, awkward, emotional, and poor, while Kelly-Anne is tall, confident, stoic, and wealthy.
- For the Evulz: The prosecution notes that the victims, being young, innocent, blond-haired and blue-eyed girls, are worth the most money on the Snuff Film market, but the defense attorney counters that Chevalier doesn't have all this money that he's supposedly made by targeting high-value victims. This might lead viewers to suspect that he committed the murders simply for the thrill of it. However, a subversion arrives in the final minutes of the film with the reveal that Chevalier was being paid in cryptocurrency, and therefore his motive was at least partly financial.
- Gratuitous English: Kelly-Anne has programmed her AI Guinevere to respond to and speak English rather than French. It's never explained why, though she also uses English on the Dark Web, and she says that she's trained Guinevere on social media websites, so it might be because it learned in English.
- Law Procedural: Played with. The trial proceedings are viewed by Kelly-Anne and Clementine, but the main drama is Kelly-Anne's own reactions and her strange responses to the case.
- Lonely Bachelor Pad: While Kelly-Anne's high rise apartment is very expensive, she has no furniture or decorations in her kitchen or living room at all other than her computer desk, emphasizing her lonely, obsession-fueled existence. When Clementine crashes in her apartment, she sleeps on the floor, and the pair sit cross-legged on the floor to eat.
- Monster Fangirl: Invoked numerous times as the reason Kelly-Anne and other women are at the trial. Subverted by Clementine, who genuinely believes that Chevalier is innocent, and deconstructed by Kelly-Anne. While she's ostensibly working towards a different and more noble goal, her motivations remain unclear and she seems obsessed with Chevalier even if she was trying to put him in prison and find Camille's tape.
- Morality Pet: While Kelly-Anne resists any attempt to open up about herself, she shows kindness to Clementine, paying for her squash racket and her food.
- Moral Sociopathy: The most likely explanation for Kelly-Anne's behavior. She has some traits of The Sociopath: she appears devoid of empathy; she has no strong emotional reactions even to otherwise very distressing content and feels nothing about worsening a grieving family's pain; she is capable of detaching and is highly intelligent, thriving under high-pressure circumstances; she behaves in a way that most people around her find repellent. However, she is ultimately revealed to be using these traits for some form of good or at least not evil, though it's left ambiguous. She's looking for Camille's Snuff Tape so that Chevalier will plead guilty to her murder. This means that she ensures Camille gets justice, but she still watches the tape herself and breaks in and gives it to Camille's mother rather than to someone else, and it's heavily implied that she keeps her own copy of it afterwards.
- Mysterious Past: We learn hardly anything about Kelly-Anne, and she refuses everyone's attempts to question or understand her.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The film refrains from showing any explicit violence from the snuff films, instead focusing on audio and the reactions of the courtroom audience, as well as Clementine's response while watching the footage on Kelly-Anne's computer.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: The movie poster features a portrait of the main characters distorted by visual glitches, and there is a datamosh effect occurring at certain times in the movie proper, evoking an unsettling Analog Horror aesthetic.
- The Oner: The courtroom scene early on, featuring both the prosecution and defense attorneys delivering their opening statements, is shot in a single take lasting 17 minutes.
- Pet the Dog: Kelly-Anne is extremely patient and supportive when teaching Clementine squash, not getting annoyed with her even when Clementine herself gets frustrated.
- Pubescent Braces: The thirteen-year-old Camille wore braces. It's played for horror when grown woman Kelly-Anne dresses up as Camille and even wears braces to complete the illusion.
- Red Herring:
- The opening courtroom scene ends with a zoom-in on Kelly-Anne as the defense attorney comments that no witness to the crimes exists. The camera movement implies that she was somehow involved in or witnessed the crimes, but it turns out not to be the case.
- The defense attorney states that the killer's description also matches a member of the jury, and Kelly-Anne keeps glaring at a specific man in the courtroom throughout the trial, suggesting that her obsession with the case might be the result of some personal knowledge about someone in the courtroom. But this never plays out.
- Riddle for the Ages: We never find out any details about why Kelly-Anne does the things she does, particularly why she is so obsessed with the Chevalier case.
- Serial Killer: Chevalier is accused of being the serial killer seen in the Red Rooms snuff films. He is.
- Shout-Out:
- Kelly-Anne's Screen Name is LadyOfShalott, and her desktop image is the painting of the character by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Like the lady, Kelly-Anne lives in a tower and only interacts with the world by proxy, in her case through her computer. Her AI is named Guinevere, another reference to the King Arthur myth.
- One of the participants in the dark web snuff film auction anticipates the end of the bidding with "Tha- tha- that's all, folks?", quoting Porky Pig of Looney Tunes.
- Shown Their Work: A police officer gives a perfectly accurate and unsensational description of the Dark Web.
- Snuff Film: Chevalier is accused of making these. Kelly-Anne buys and watches the video of his final victim, Camille, in the closing minutes.
- Social Media Is Bad: Kelly-Anne trained her AI on various social media websites but had to take a very active role in cleaning it up so that it would not tell her to kill herself or say racist things.
- Statuesque Stunner: Kelly-Anne is a model, and Clementine notes how tall she is, saying she feels like a dwarf standing beside her.
- The Voiceless: Though Kelly-Anne watches him obsessively, Chevalier is never heard speaking.
- Working Through the Cold: The judge presiding over the trial has a cold in the opening scenes. This, combined with his very mild tone of voice, emphasizes that, for all the case's lurid details and the obsession it's aroused in the public, he's just doing his job.