Is it morally wrong to enjoy true crime? The question itself is tricky because the true crime genre itself has changed over the years. Up until the 2000s, I think, the genre was more niche, to use the most polite phrasing possible. If you liked books about gangsters, documentaries about serial murder and the like, you could expect to get more than a little side-eye from normies. Why? It was deviant.

Not so much any longer. These days, it’s de rigueur to listen to a podcast about Jonestown or watch a dramatization of the life and crimes of one Jeffrey Dahmer. Instead of something deviant, it’s just a way to spend Friday night. To my mind, I’m okay with someone being an enthusiast as long as you bear one inescapable fact in mind, which is that these stories are about real people.* Real people who, by and large, spent their last moments in pain. 

It also begs the question, why are we so drawn to the criminal and the macabre? Sometimes I think we live vicariously through it as a way of facing darkness from a safe distance. But other times, there are darker aspects, such as an obsession with the accused or an unshakeable need to know. That’s what Red Rooms digs into, and sometimes its pitiless focus is chillingly effective.

On the surface, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) seems to have adapted to the twenty-first century perfectly. She’s a successful model, a vicious online poker player, and has a canny understanding of cryptocurrency. That’s why she has an apartment in Montreal with a million dollar view and rent to match.

So why does Kelly-Anne spend her free time at the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man credibly accused of butchering three teenage girls? Early every morning, she leaves her sleek apartment and naps in an alley, which allows her to grab a seat in the courtroom’s gallery. She doesn’t speak to her fellow viewers, and she rebuffs offers by the media to be interviewed. Kelly-Anne says virtually nothing, but she always pays attention.

That changes when she makes the acquaintance of Clementine (Laurie Babin), a young woman who arrives as a murder groupie. Down to her bones, she’s convinced that Ludovic is an innocent man, a patsy. Of course, the shadowy “they” are the ones behind it. She doesn’t recognize the base ludicrousness of her opinion,** she simply treats it as a given.

Slowly, Kelly-Anne and Clementine become…well, “friends” is perhaps not the right term. Clementine assumes Kelly-Anne is at the trial for the same reasons she is. They talk, eat together, and eventually the unhoused Clementine is invited to stay at Kelly-Anne’s flat. Things will change, radically, when Kelly-Anne gets her hands on a video. It shows unspeakable atrocities. There’s another video like it, and people are willing to pay for it. Kelly-Anne is one of them.

Red Rooms isn’t going to give you easy answers, and it definitely won’t give you answers you’ll like. Director Pascal Plante directs the majority of the film in a chilly, antiseptic style. Lots of colder colors, lots of slow and deliberate camera movements. Those moments mirror Kelly-Anne’s mental state, one that’s all about discipline and control. As she becomes more obsessed with the case and as she begins to unravel, Plante shows us more of the color red, more angles that suggest this young woman is falling apart. He’s also able to balance effectively between the tasteful and the depraved. An early courtroom sequence where a prosecutor explains what is on the murder room tape promises ghoulish imagery. Plante knows that whatever we imagine will be far worse than what he can put on screen, and with the exception of a brief still and some nightmarish sound effects, he doesn’t show us anything. 

Plante also wrote the screenplay, and he’s a fearless writer, the kind with precisely zero interest in making the audience comfortable. A lesser screenplay would portray Kelly-Anne as a likable young woman who wants to solve a murder and blah blah blah. Here, the script is content to simply show the behavior of the characters and let us draw our own conclusions. For a certain kind of viewer, that decision is going to be frustrating. Plante gets that, despite the serial killer trappings, this isn’t a genre piece. It’s a character study.

Juliette Gariépy carries the film, and she does so with a performance that’s intelligent, icy, then explosively disturbing. When she needs to be, her Kelly-Anne is perfectly disciplined, and we can easily see how she’s built a comfortable life. She begins to slip, becoming a little too interested in the trial of Ludovic, and Gariépy initially shows the cracks forming in Kelly-Anne’s psyche. Her psyche breaks in a remarkable sequence, where Kelly-Anne arrives at court dressed exactly like one of the victims, down to braces. When she gets the attention of Ludovic, I think she’s viciously taunting him, but she does so with sociopathic disregard of the victim’s family, who happen to be in the room witnessing this bizarre spectacle. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a movie in a long while, and I have huge admiration for Gariépy’s commitment to showing us how Kelly-Anne is behaving and withholding why.

At the end of the day, I suppose the ultimate reason for true crime’s enduring popularity is the question of why. We want to understand the blackest depths of the human heart, and the fact remains that some actions are unknowable, perhaps even to the offenders themselves. Red Rooms wants to show us who a true crime enthusiast can be, and what the end point of their obsession gets them as a reward.

*I have a bit of a problem with Jack the Ripper being used as fodder for movies and video games. Why? Because during that awful autumn in 1888, at least five women died, and died hard. Even before that happened, most if not all of them were in the clutches of addiction and poverty. The only survival option they saw was to sell their bodies for a pitifully small amount of money. 

**Much like the people who still believe the 2020 election was rigged. 

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.