When it comes to serial killer stories in cinema, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve seen it all.
From campy slashers to exploitative biopics to first-person arthouse flicks, serial killers are a mainstay across a plethora of genres, and, as such, finding an approach that’s not utterly trodden ground poses a problem for most modern filmmakers. Which is exactly why Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges), written and directed by Pascal Plante, stands out as such an innovative and compelling take on the trope.
Red Rooms starts where most of these stories end – at the trial of Ludovic Chevalier, an accused serial killer who is on trial for the live-streamed assault and murder of several young girls. We follow Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), an attendee of the high-profile case, whose motivations for her fascination with the crimes is uneasily ambiguous.
And, right from the off, Red Rooms finds an incredibly restrained but extremely effective way to approach this story – utterly matter-of-fact, the details of the case described by the defence and prosecution, the images and sounds from the tapes in question glimpsed in the corner of the frame or heard through closed doors. Pascal’s slick directorial style that delivers information in long, unbroken shots allows for a blunt straightforwardness to the nature of these crimes, not veiling it beneath the trappings of horror or drama, but just presenting it as it might be in the real world. It’s discomfortingly realistic, a horror nightmare delivered with a courtroom drama.
But, by far, the most prominent selling point of Red Rooms is Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne. This is one of those performances that, in the wrong hands, could so easily descend into blank, bland nothingness – Kelly-Anne is such a restrained and evasive character, a woman whose motivations and goals the film never goes to great lengths to allow us to understand. For the entire film’s run, you’re questioning whether she’s a villain, a victim, an accomplice, some mix of all of the above, as she drifts from her sterile apartment to the equally-sterile backdrop of the courtroom where the trial takes place. So much of her on-screen interaction is done via a screen, whether gambling online or posing for photos as part of her job.
But Gariépy plays her with an astonishing skill that punches through her cold, unreadable exterior with moments of shocking, uncontrolled emotion – Plante taps in to aspects of Arthurian mythology to hint at depths to who she is and why she’s drawn to Chevalier in the first place, scattering just enough pieces into the set design and mise-en-scene to create a fully-formed image of who she is. Between Plante’s restrained script, and what Gariépy brings to the role, Kelly-Anne makes for one of the most compelling protagonists in recent cinematic memory.
Red Rooms is a genuinely innovative and downright brilliant addition to the serial killer cinema canon, and proof that, no matter how well-worn a trope might be, in the right hands, there’s always fresh approaches to be uncovered.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Indiewire)
No But Listen 