Why are we so drawn to atrocity? Out of all the human foibles, our fascination with the nightmarish is one that defines us and afflicts us like no other species. That obsession may have reached its zenith (or nadir, depending on your perspective) in the true crime drama – a genre whose biggest audience remains women.
A multiplicity of reasons have been given for this sociological fact – a way for the most likely victims of violent crime to distance or process their fears, compassion for the victims, salacious thrills, even some twisted fetishization – and it’s the central enigma of French-Canadian chiller Red Rooms, a disturbing courtroom drama with a sickening psychological twist.
The crimes are beyond vile. Ludovic Chevalier (McCabe-Lokos) has been accused of making snuff films: torturing and murdering three schoolgirls, then selling the video footage on the dark web. As the prosecuting attorney (Tannous) lays out to the jury in her opening statement, it seems like an open and shut case, and Chevalier’s defense lawyer (Chagnon) can only throw out chaff and raise vague questions of due process. They banter while Chevalier sits in his Perspex box in the courtroom, a cube presumably constructed to prevent a member of the grieving families from leaping across the barricades and throttling him.
But the legal niceties of Chevalier’s trial are of less interest to writer/director Pascal Plante than what’s happening in the public seating at the back of the courtroom. What would possibly motivate anyone to spend their day hearing the most horrifying details of this case – and maybe, finally, see the actual footage? For Clementine (Babin), it’s obvious because she talks about it all the time: She’s convinced that soft-voiced, kind-eyed Chevalier couldn’t possibly have committed the crimes of which he is convicted. Babin provides a degree of empathy for all those women who propose to convicted killers in jail, whose fannish devotion to murderers leads them to dark places. Her meltdown as she calls in to a late-night TV show in which the hosts are making “edgy” jokes about Chevalier’s crime spree is pathetic and tragic, but it’s easily explained.
What’s more opaque is why fashion model Kelly-Anne (Gariépy) is sat next to Clementine in the courtroom, and is so willing to risk her reputation as her in-person actions and online research on the dark web becoming ever more disturbing. There’s something detached and broken in Gariépy’s performance, a haunted quality that makes her seem calculating in contrast to Clementine’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. It becomes increasingly clear that Kelly-Anne has seen atrocities, but the question becomes about the context, and why she has decided to sit and watch Chevalier, through day after day after day of vile evidence, and night after night after night of dabbling on the dark web, trying to leave no digital footprints but becoming ever more enmeshed in online depravity.
Plante never throws gore in the audience’s face because this isn’t a horror film with the catharsis of bloodletting. This is a character study in extremis, built around the strengthening bond and rising tension between an aimless serial killer lover and her more driven but mysterious counterpart. The evidence of the crimes is described rather than reenacted, the recordings only heard or seen in reflections, but even witnessing that little is grueling, disturbing, and heartrending. Pascal never lets the two women’s relationship obscure the fact that their obsession is built on the corpses of three girls. Instead, he uses the constant mournful presence of the mother of one of the victims (Locas, her every movement a silent wail of grief) to keep the perspective suitably tragic. All three women have stared into the abyss, and Red Rooms is both poignant and unnerving as it shows the abyss staring back.
This article appears in The 34th Annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.
