Yours portly has finally had some time to watch some movies again, and it really went from famine to feast.  I’ve watched several solid flicks lately, including this week’s selection, the French-Canadian psychological thriller Red Rooms (2023).

Red Rooms follows Kelly-Anne, a gorgeous and intelligent model who makes her living playing online poker.  For unknown reasons, Kelly-Anne attends the sensational trial of a serial killer, Ludovic Chevalier, sitting stoically while observing the accused and the mother of one of his victims, Francine Beaulieu.  Kelly-Anne’s obsession with the case and Francine is never really explained, but the implication is that she takes some manner of sick pleasure in the proceedings.  The film is so subtle on this point—except for one scene late in the film—that the viewer never quite knows what Kelly-Anne is doing there.

In this case, that’s a virtue.  Kelly-Anne’s motives are always open to speculation, encouraging the viewer to engage closely with the film.  It also helps that the viewer must pay close attention, unless he understands French, because the entire film is in French; ergo, he’ll spend a lot of time reading subtitles.  What is clear is that Kelly-Anne is into some weird stuff, and exists on the Internet as “LadyofShallottes,” where she wins a small fortune in Bitcoin playing poker with an intense hyper-rationality.  She also engages in more illicit activities, including attempting to obtain the lost video of the murder of Chevalier’s third victim, Francine’s daughter Camille.

Into this strange tableau comes Clementine, a poor girl from Quebec countryside who believers that Chevalier is innocent.  She vocally questions every aspect of the Chevalier case, arguing that the evident does dispel reasonable doubt.  She even objects to the Crown’s use of a female prosecutor for the case, arguing it is good optics for the prosecution to win over the jury’s sympathy.

Despite their quite different personalities—Kelly-Anne is cold and aloof, while Clementine is warm and impassioned—the two become friends, with the borderline-homeless Clementine living with Kelly-Anne during her stay in Montreal.  The two camp out each night near the courthouse so they can be there when it opens, claiming one of the few seats in the courtroom.

The first half or so of the film has the viewer trying to ascertain Kelly-Anne’s motives, and wondering if Clementine’s objections are sound or just the desperate babblings of a groupie.  The turning point comes when Clementine asks Kelly-Anne why she has been attending the trial; when Kelly-Anne cannot (or, perhaps, refuses to) answer, Clementine leaves for home.  Right before this parting of ways, Kelly-Anne showed Clementine the videos of the first two victims’ murders, which shattered Clementine’s illusions about Chevalier’s innocence.

After this point, Kelly-Anne begins going deeper down the rabbit hole of the dark web in a desperate quest to obtain the third video.  What happens next is dark, but also offers our confused anti-heroine an opportunity at redemption.

Red Rooms is an exquisite thriller.  It depicts a cold, lifeless Montreal, between the starkly white and modern courtroom and Kelly-Anne’s high-tech, high-rise apartment.  It is a world in which technology is a malicious force, and the Internet is a world in which grifters and murderers and perverts flourish.  The title refers to the semi-legendary “red rooms” of the TOR network, rooms in which murders are livestreamed for a paying audience.  The film suggests that we are living in an extremely dark and wicked cyberspace; the Truth of that message makes the film all that more disturbing and engrossing.