Red Rooms: Voyeurism as Modern Nightmare
Red Rooms (2023), written and directed by Pascal Plante, doesn’t just explore the horror of crime—it confronts the far more disturbing reality that we are drawn to watching it unfold. Red Rooms follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a socially isolated young woman consumed by the trial of a notorious serial killer. Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) has been accused of murdering three young girls, whose recorded deaths were sold on the dark web’s infamous “Red Rooms” for the sadistic consumption of voyeuristic audiences. In this meticulously crafted, deeply unsettling thriller, Kelly-Anne becomes increasingly entangled in her obsession. Her fixation with the case drives her to delve deeper into the dark web, seeking out the elusive third snuff film connected to the case. Gariépy, who won the Prix Iris for Revelation of the Year at Le Gala Quebec Cinema, delivers a truly special breakout performance—a clinic in internal and understated acting, faultlessly embodying our emotionally reticent, elusive protagonist.
Plante roots his thriller firmly in the 2020s, using the concerns of our digital age—surveillance, online personas, AI, anonymity—to craft a film that feels unflinchingly contemporary and chillingly relevant. The film is rooted in post-COVID anxieties, a daunting realm to occupy for film-makers. Kelly-Anne lives an isolated life, her existence permeated by sterile, confined spaces and the glow of her computer screen. Yet Kelly-Anne is far from aimless—she shifts between identities: successful online poker pro, model, serial killer obsessionist, hacking expert. Hyper-intelligent and highly digitally competent, she navigates anonymity and artifice with unsettling ease, a quintessential product of the 21st century. Much of the film takes place on her dual computer screens, featuring incredibly disconcerting hacking scenes. We watch Kelly-Anne gain access to personal data, even breach home-security systems, with a concerning effortlessness. All whilst frequently conversing with a personalized smart home device named Guinevere, her all-seeing, joke-telling AI assistant.
Plante navigates this terrain with remarkable restraint, avoiding heavy-handed commentary while embedding these themes seamlessly into the film. In doing so, Red Rooms becomes a reflection of a society grappling with its own voyeuristic impulses and the growing tension between hyper-visibility and faceless anonymity—where we watch, and are watched, from behind the safe distance of our screens.
Plante, and his cinematographer Vincent Biron, adopt a meticulous, almost Fincher-esque, style, featuring tightly controlled framing and clinical camera movements. The use of intimate close-ups, primarily of Kelly-Anne, is a frequent tool, inviting viewers into her internal world while offering little resolution. Her expression is an enigmatic canvas—still, unreadable, and intensely unnerving—forcing us to scrutinize her face as obsessively as she watches the trial. These lingering shots heighten her emotional ambiguity, compelling us to project our own interpretations onto her silence.
Their reliance on long takes further elongates key moments, imbuing them with a suffocating intensity. We are forced to sit with the ethical discomfort of engaging with such material, yet we can’t look away. The unbroken gaze of the camera implicates us, blurring the line between observer and participant, forcing an uncomfortable confrontation with our own voyeuristic curiosity.
While Red Rooms teases the structure of a procedural thriller, Plante’s true focus lies not in the grisly details of the case but in the psychological landscapes shaped by its aftermath. The film deliberately withholds explicit depictions of violence, opting instead to build dread through implication, reaction, emotional fallout. By never showing the murders or the dark web videos in graphic detail, Plante weaponizes the unknown, which, ultimately, is always far more terrifying—the horror our own imaginations can conjure. This restraint underscores the film’s preoccupation with voyeurism: it’s not what we see, but how we respond to what we believe has happened that defines the experience.
Red Rooms masterfully leans into ambiguity, inviting myriad interpretations of both its ending and Kelly-Anne’s true motivations. Plante’s protagonist remains largely inscrutable throughout—her motivations are never truly revealed—whose actions remain as opaque as her expressionless gaze. Is Kelly-Anne driven by obsession, justice, trauma, or something far more complex? The film offers only fragmented clues, resisting clear moral or emotional conclusions. This ambiguity transforms Red Rooms into an intricate psychological puzzle, one that lingers and claws at your conscience. Not to mention it contains one of the most petrifying, and disturbing, courtroom scenes ever recorded… the sounds of which haven’t left my head since first viewing.
With Red Rooms, Plante has potentially crafted a defining film of 2020’s cinema; a thriller that transcends procedural conventions, stripping away sensationalist crime tropes to expose something far more unsettling: our own complicity and voyeurism as viewers. In a world where true crime has become commodified entertainment, Red Rooms dares to implicate its audience—not with what it shows, but with what it leaves unseen, lingering in the dark corners of our imagination. The horror is not just in the crime, but in the act of looking—and realizing we can’t look away.