I Want to Ask Your Forgiveness for What I Will Inflict on You: Red Rooms (2023) and the Abjection of Obsession

“That’s what I love, seeing them lose everything.”

In order to talk about Red Rooms the movie, we need to talk about red rooms, the phenomenon. Red rooms – like the snuff films of which they are a natural extension – are an urban legend referring, according to Wikipedia, “to a hidden service or website on the dark web, depicting the live torture and murder of individuals,” usually on a pay-per-view basis.

Like snuff films, there is no solid evidence that real red rooms exist at all and, indeed, the logistics of hosting them on anonymous networks makes the practical possibility of them unlikely, a fact that is addressed briefly in Pascal Plante’s film. In fact, online skeptic websites suggest that the origins of the myth of the red room might lie with the eponymous show at the heart of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, where similar acts are carried out in a chamber with reddish clay walls.

The legend persists, though, even as fake “red room” sites set themselves up to part the morbid and credulous from their bitcoins, and one need not dig too deeply to find the occasional real event that is uncomfortably close – I don’t recommend learning much about Peter Scully or the notorious video known as Daisy’s Destruction.

Pascal Plante’s courtroom thriller, which debuted at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2023 and is now available to stream on VOD, opens with the beginnings of a court case against Ludovic Chevalier, who is accused of being the “Demon of Rosemont,” a serial killer who slew three teenage girls in a homemade “red room” and broadcast their deaths on the dark web for money.

We hear the opening statements of both the prosecution and the defense, and the former makes it clear for the jury and the audience that this is the first instance of a “real” red room, as far as anyone knows. Yet, it doesn’t take long for those of us actually watching at home to realize that the red rooms of the film’s title aren’t necessarily the ones where the Demon of Rosemont did his killing.

Our audience point-of-view character is Kelly-Anne, a fashion model with an expensive but Spartan apartment whose life seems to revolve around little more than exercise, playing video poker, and attending the Chevalier trial. In order to be sure that she’s one of the few who gets to do the latter, she sleeps each night on the street so that she can be among those first in line at the courthouse door.

Unlike Clementine, a “groupie” of Chevalier who Kelly-Anne briefly befriends while they are both attending the trial, Kelly-Anne herself remains something of a cypher, even unto the last few minutes of the film. While this seems like a largely intentional and probably wise choice by the filmmakers, allowing her to be read in a number of different ways, it also means that Red Rooms is never able to examine too closely the inner workings of her character – or, by extension, those real-life individuals for whom her character might be a metaphor.

The movie’s choice to be about red rooms, even though it diegetically acknowledges that they don’t actually exist, doesn’t feel like an accidental one, either. While there may not be real red rooms, under the eyes of true crime junkies like Clementine and Kelly-Anne, and the lenses of the TV cameras waiting on the courthouse steps, the courtroom itself becomes a red room, where the crime is replayed for their delectation.

How much difference is there, after all, between watching a murder take place, and reconstructing that same murder through your favorite true crime series, book, or podcast?

Of course, any obsession can become troubling when it’s taken too far, and Red Rooms makes it clear that something has been taken too far long before we are really shown the extent of the rabbit hole down which our lead character has traveled. Back when I first watched The Social Network, I commented on how David Fincher made a movie about the founding of Facebook that feels exactly like a movie about a serial killer.

Perhaps it’s less of a stretch to make a movie about watching a serial killer’s trial that also feels so much like a movie about a serial killer – but then again, given the damage that Facebook has done, perhaps not – but the execution of it is no less impressive. Though Red Rooms shows almost nothing, the camera work, soundscape, and editing are never short of disquieting and occasionally manage to generate some of the most potent unease of the year.

I will need more time and possibly another viewing to crystallize an opinion about the film’s ending, however. In the last five minutes or so, events transpire which served, at least for me, to muddle all that had come before. It isn’t what we would normally call a twist and, indeed, it all feels relatively inevitable given the buildup, but the actual ways in which it plays out seem to perhaps undercut the film’s meaning – or at least confuse it.

That said, I’m not sure that Red Rooms actually has a terribly strong central thesis, or necessarily needs one. Simply saying, “Hey, maybe there’s not much light between a red room and your favorite true crime podcast” is perhaps a bit corny and not terribly novel, but it also does directly address some of the thorny ethical implications of true crime, even if it has no answers to provide. And while its formal mastery of generating unease is probably greater than its ability to create any actual meaning from that, sometimes unease is plenty.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.