A Year of Endless Wind
A few words about Red Rooms
I remembered a lot from my first viewing of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms. Everything, really, though not always the order of things, or the pace, or the smaller details. So not everything. But it felt like everything, watching it again, the rush returning. A kind of sense memory took over—or muscle memory, more like—with scenes falling cascade-like, flowing and crashing into each other with each disturbing moment or implication. Red Rooms is a disturbing film; availability hampered my efforts, but I can’t lie, there was some avoidance of returning to it, of sitting through it once more. The surprise, then, lay in how easy it was to watch again. Apparently there’s some comfort in reliving a nightmare.
The end of the year—and start of a new one—is an odd time. An artificial delineation that nonetheless becomes a fixed point in our imaginations. It’s representational and real at once, a signal of change, but not just the change itself. The measurement of time reveals its endless forward march. Powerlessness is what the new year is all about: reminding us how powerless we are, how powerless we’ve been, and maybe inspiring us to try for a little more sense of will if we can help it. It’s been more than a year since I first saw Red Rooms, at one-off screening in Toronto in the summer of 2023, not long after it played Fantasia in Montreal. I’ve been through a lot in that year plus. Some wonderful things—my sister’s wedding, and her giving birth to her first child, my first niece, and the chubbiest you’ve ever seen—and some difficult things—having your spleen out, a 3/10 experience—and some lifechanging things—lost my regular job and one of my closest relationships. The events are particular, but the change is invetible. Such is time. It forces new contexts into being.
I had gone to see Red Rooms all of a sudden, really. It had only just played a couple of festivals, and it was nowhere near my radar. Justine Peres Smith, who programs at Fantasia and is one of the smartest critics I know, had tweeted that the movie was being specially screened in Toronto and that it was one to go see. So I went, because I listen to Justine on matters like these. I was expectedly rewarded, but beyond all expectations. The film only screened once more in Toronto after that, as part of another small festival of French-language movies at the Carlton. I believe I managed to convince at least one person at the time to go check it out there. They thanked me in turn. Paying it forward feels great.
Red Rooms is a serial killer movie of a sort. It opens with the beginning of a trial. The accused, we will come to learn during a bravura opening arguments sequence, has been charged with multiple counts related to allegedly kidnapping, torturing, and mutliating young girls, all on camera, for live paying audiences on the dark web. I say
”allegedly,” as though that has any meaning in this fictional context, but it’s important that at no point does this man’s guilt ever truly come into question. It’s not even that we’re presented with specific evidence, but the filmmaking tells us what we need to know. As the Crown and the defence attorneys each make their case, in real time, we come to understand the outlines of the case and how it has come to capture the public’s attention. It brings to mind certain true crime stories, including the Luka Magnotta case, which you can Google if you don’t remember it. It’s terrible. And highly Canadian. Which also describes the feeling of watching Red Rooms.
You don’t really see anything in Red Rooms. Not really. You hear things. Horrible things. But you see pretty much nothing. The film is instead focused on spaces and faces. The killer may be at the centre of the film’s gravitational pull, but he is not what the film is about, or whom. The whom is Kelly-Anne, played by Juliette Gariépy, a working model and internet genius whose fascination with the case has become a chilling obsession. Early every morning she heads down to the courthouse, sleeping in an alley outside to be first in line for a seat in the courtroom. Who this person is, what motivates her, is the real question at the heart of Red Rooms, and the textual answers to those questions illuminate only the most unpleasant facets of the modern experience. Kelly-Anne is hardly inhuman. She even acts out of a proper sense of fairness, of justice. Still, she is separated, alienated, floating outside and above the rest of humanity as the logic of her being is subsumed into the sociopathy of online life. The line between her prurience and a constructive interest in the case is, in effect non-existent. The killings, and the videos of them, exist in her world as facts to be analyzed like everything else—like the online poker games she plays to earn an easy living on the side—but they also infect her. In his great piece about the film over at Mubi, Adam Nayman said of Kelly-Anne, “She’s a person who’s either capable of anything or in thrall to urges she doesn’t understand, or maybe both at once, a possibility that pressurizes her action in the home stretch.” This may be underselling the unease inspired by her character, who does indeed seem capable of anything in a way few fictional characters ever have. The killer, at least, is in a box, being held there until the end of a trial whose outcome seems foretold. He is not a threat. But Kelly-Anne is.
Kelly-Anne’s counterpoint in the film is Clementine, played Laurie Babin, a young woman from a small town far outside Quebec City. She’s also obsessed with the case, having hitchhiked and then bussed down to Montreal for the trial, to be there in support of the killer, who she fancifully believes is innocent. This man, his story, his sad eyes, have captured her heart, this outsider. We never really come to know why Clementine did fall for him. There’s what she says, but people lie to themselves. All we have, then, is portrait. This mousy young thing, so earnest, but so clearly broken inside. She comes from a small town that no longer has a direct bus connection. She is isolated, doesn’t know much English, doesn’t feel comfortable in the cold spaces of modern Montreal, and certainly doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. This is another kind of person whose life is lived online, searching for human connections to feel the worth in her own life. A scene in which she calls into a TV chat show defending the killer and being made into an object of mass media mockery shatters her, though not as much as finally seeing videos of the killings. Hers is a world built on illusions and aspirations, fed by the simultaneous distance and proximity of virtual interaction. Kelly-Anne’s is something else. Something more depraved. Scarier.
I look at my life, having grown up roughly with the development of the world wide web, watching my own world consumed by binary data until I’m no longer sure whether my real-life or online existence is the more true one, if they’re separable at all. Personal trials are mirrored in a collapsing world that I mostly view through the window of social media, the distance that provides giving space for comment, and analysis, irony, and investment, but also detachment. The world feels less human, and I worry I feel less human in it. The subject matter of Red Rooms is viscerally upsetting, but what’s disturbing about the film is its transposition of an online world, and all its uncaring, over the real one. It’s the suggestion that what’s real in one is real in the other, but as one begins to dominate, so reality shifts, becoming less recognizably us. Products of us, yes, but not us. The fundamentals of humanity removed from the logic of the world we’ve built, in which justice and fetish are impossible to tell apart, and in which the wind outside Kelly-Anne’s condo unit in the sky whistles endlessly, a reminder of a physical world we’ve chosen to shut out, the precarity of it, but also the tactility.
Here, at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, in the fiction of timekeeping, we find ourselves at a moment in history. A crossroads, or perhaps a dead end. It feels more like having slipped into a river, honestly, roughed up by the rapids and heading toward the fall. I look at the world, and I see Red Rooms, and that disturbs me more than anything. But it also doesn’t feel like a inevitability. We’ve been moved by the forces of our time, those forces far out of the bounds of our control, but still we have choices, and we can choose other things. I’d like to think so, at least. Maybe not the most uplifting feeling heading into a new year, but I hear the wind blowing by my apartment window and I’d like to feel it on my face.