What a way to start off the haunting season! You can keep your ghosts and goblins. The real monsters are on the dark web.
Red Rooms/ Les chambreas rouges
Red Rooms is a French-Canadian psychological thriller. This 2023 film, directed and written by Pascal Plante and starring Juliette Gariepy, Laurie Babin, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos and Elisabeth Locas, is truly frightening in that the subject matter is true. There is a dark web where human traffickers live stream the sexual abuse of women and children…but do they also kill people on these streaming services?
The first half of the film is set in the courtroom. Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is being charged with the deaths of three young girls, ages 13, 14 and 16. The prosecutor for the Crown states that Ludovic kidnapped, raped, tortured, dismembered, and killed the girls. As sick as the crimes that Ludovic is charged with, what is worse is that anonymous people pay huge crypto sums to watch the videos that were made of the deaths. Law officials are positive they have the right man from the two videos that were found on the web. The defence lawyer claims that there is no positive proof because there is no clear view of Ludovic’s face. Does the missing video of the 13-year-old, Camille, offer a better identification of the killer?
The Groupies
There are people who believe that Ludovic is innocent. One is a young teen, Clementine (Laurie Babin), who ran away from home so that she could sleep on the street across from the courthouse to be first in line as an observer of the ongoing trial. The other person is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy), a model, high-stake online poker player, and professional hacker. Her computer is high tech and instead of an Alexa…she has an AI called Guinevere. Kelly-Anne makes enough money from her modelling gigs and online poker games to have a penthouse apartment, but she is also sleeping on the streets to get that seat inside the courtroom. Somehow these two women make friends, but we soon suspect that Kelly-Anne has some strange obsessions about the whole court case and the murdered girls. Where we have some sense of Clementine’s gullible belief that Ludovic is innocent, we are completely thrown off balance as to Kelly-Anne’s obsession.
Conclusion and Spoilers
Luckily, we are spared the actual torture scenes, but hearing the cries of those three girls was bad enough. Camille’s mother (Elisabeth Locus), as well as the parents of the other two victims, not only have to watch the videos, but put up with Ludovic’s fan club in the observation section.
Gariepy’s character is troubling in that she doesn’t seem human. Her knowledge of hacking comes in handy and enables her to break into the home of one of the victims. When she shows up in court dressed as one of the victims including a wig, contacts and braces…she gets an appreciative smile from Ludovic before the police throw her out of the courthouse.
The film concentrated on Ludovic’s crimes, but Gariepy’s performance as Kelly-Anne was so powerful that we found ourselves more focused on her movements, her secrets. Kelly-Anne’s online name was Lady of Shalott. It is at the very end of the film that we are shown the real monster. It is the ones who pay to watch the Ludovics.
As a sidenote, this year’s 31 Days of Horror is about the Devil. I am going to write about demons and possessions from the viewpoint of a psychic/medium. The Devil is real, and he is nasty…but let me tell you something that I have learned in my 77 years on this planet…humans wrote the book on evil.
