We love an inscrutable protagonist, don’t we, folks? Red Rooms (2023) offers up a compelling protagonist in Kelly-Anne played excellently by Juliette Gariép with eerie stillness. We learn that Kelly-Anne is a model, is addicted to playing online poker, and is first witnessed sleeping in the street to attend the trial of Ludovic Chevalier, charged as a serial killer of three teenage girls. Red Rooms is a courtroom trial movie, as many scenes take place with Kelly-Anne as a silent observer to the proceedings, and it is a character study.
Resolving the conundrum of Kelly-Anne, who exists as a surface harbouring darker impulses, becomes a way of exploring public obsession with true-crime. Director Pascal Plante finds ways to let the imagination take hold, downplaying any actual on-screen violence or images of what’s transpired for verbalised discussion and off-screen consumption. With Dominique Plante’s score, which connects to gothic and giallo sounds with its use of the harpsichord, medieval flourishes to the ‘Lady of Shallott’ self-identification Kelly-Anne has, there’s also a mythic quality intermingled with the tech depersonalisation. Laurie Babin is also good as a fellow obsessive and defender of Ludovic, fidgety and external, a good contrast to the placid Kelly-Anne who she becomes friends with.
Red Rooms touches on that sub-category of movies that is like someone at a party taking you into a corner and announcing, “Let me show you evil.” And yet it’s not easy to shake, and for every movie-movie bit of contrivance, there’s an arresting and unsettling edge following our inscrutable protagonist.
Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.
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