By David Ryan.
Writer-director Pascal Plante connects the complicated mechanisms of justice, social contagions, and psychological complexity to explore two dominant themes: the film contrasts the courtroom’s brightly lit (and tightly-controlled) semiotics with the digital world’s illicit market economy.”
Red Rooms or Les Chambres Rouges (2023) focuses on the questionable and strategic behavior of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a poker-faced model who fixates on the Montreal trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man accused of separately murdering three teenage girls in virtual Red Rooms for online crypto-customers. As Kelly-Anne regularly departs her secure high rise to sleep in an alley to snatch a courtroom seat, she befriends Clementine (Laurie Babin), a fervent Chevalier supporter who believes in his innocence.
While Plante explores their budding relationship, the film adeptly delves into Kelly-Anne’s virtual life—focusing on her anonymous online identity, use of encrypted communications, and engagement with the Dark Web’s cartel economies. Though Kelly-Anne’s techne also includes coding and card-playing, her ability to acquire and watch snuff videos adds to the more troubling parts of her character. For most of the film, however, her true motives for attending the trial are unclear. Is she drawn to the trial because of the spectacle? Is she attracted to Chevalier? Or are there other things afoot?
In his story, writer-director Pascal Plante connects the complicated mechanisms of justice, social contagions, and psychological complexity to explore two dominant themes: first, the film contrasts the courtroom’s brightly lit (and tightly-controlled) semiotics with the digital world’s illicit market economy. With this epistemic framework moving between what is seen and unseen (and what we know and don’t), Plante smartly creates a narrative that weaves the visual representations of the law with the designed ecosystems of the Deep and Dark webs.
For the first part of the film, Plante dotes on the courtroom characters to illustrate the court’s technical and ideological design. Here, the purpose is to illustrate how narrative meaning is produced when we watch specific characters and listen to their legally-oriented, rhetorical cues. Plante skillfully stages the players and tactfully moves the camera to show the organizational structure of jurisprudence where characters are given discernable positions, contrastive dialogue, and clear roles for the audience to understand. This surface-oriented semiotics contrasts with the anonymous workings of the Dark Web where its murky mapping is neither fully realized nor are its many underground players seen or heard.
As Kelly-Anne moves between these settings, the film focuses on illustrating her choices and behavior, so she is often seen in her private space, talking to her generative assistant Guinevere, minding her bookings, and playing poker anonymously as the Lady of Shalott. The Arthurian references are vague clues for sure, but what is clearer is that Plante skillfully tracks Kelly-Anne’s movements between publicly attending the trial, working as a fashion model, engaging in subversive online acts, and, later in the film, seemingly impacting the trial’s outcome.
The second theme is more difficult to comprehend. This one explores the social psychology of emotional contagions and its impact on character antipathy and empathy. On this thematic ground, our footing is less firm, for Plante develops this theme not separately from the plot but as essential character conditions. What is essential is that social interactions (in and out of court) play an important role in how emotional contagions influences others. For example, as a court strategy, the prosecutor (Natalie Tannous) warns that watching the torture-murder videos of the young victims will produce a synchronous, mirroring effect for the jurors (disgust, horror); then, they must use this collective, learned effect, she argues, to render Chevalier guilty; but the film also suggests contagions may deepen and sharpen existing trauma whether this trauma is consciously or subconsciously realized, and this private trauma can be used to act on public virtues, whether eventually speaking against Chevalier (Clementine) or seemingly providing the forensic proof necessary for Chevalier’s confession and conviction (Kelly-Anne).
Plante develops this epistemic theme further when we see characters observe one another, particularly in the courtroom, as both Clementine and Kelly-Anne watch Mme. Beaulieu (Elisabeth Locas) emotionally react to and process the trial as Chevalier is prosecuted for murdering her daughter. This theme dovetails into sub-themes of privacy, isolation, loss, and criminality, but rather than develop clearer scenes of contagion effect, Plante’s interests lie primarily in illustrating Kelly-Anne’s know-how, of showing her technical competence and illustrating her semantic understanding of systems as she pursues a darker understanding of human motives and actions.
Plante directs with a nice maturity and great command. His direction is stylishly catalogic, illustrating many details that help illustrate the tension between Kelly-Anne’s complex worlds, but the film falters in its reluctance to explain more deeply Kelly-Anne’s choices.”
The film’s more compelling aspect is the exploration of empathic personality disorders, but, the film’s biggest problem is that Kelly-Anne’s attitude toward Chevalier remains unclear for most of the film, contrasting sharply with Clementine’s more overt defense of the accused killer. Clementine seems to suffer from a form of hybristophilia, a disorder where individuals are attracted to criminals; however, Kelly-Anne is another matter. Though we are unsure why Kelly-Anne attends the trial, her attention grows more intensely identified with Mme. Beaulieu as Kelly-Anne repeatedly witnesses the mother’s public grief and frustrations with Chevalier, his supporters, and the media. Thereafter, Kelly-Anne’s empathic attention dramatically shifts more overtly to Beaulieu’s murdered daughter.
Just as interesting, the film effectively develops sub themes of risk and exposure. For example, we often see how Kelly-Anne’s carefully constructed boundaries are usurped by her own actions. Though the security barriers she has created do insulate her, these safety mechanisms are often vulnerable to her empathic and strategic choices. For example, after witnessing Beaulieu’s numerous demonstrations of her grief, Kelly-Anne dons a similar school uniform of the murdered Beaulieu daughter to court. This key scene is important in a few ways: this provocative act further upsets Mme. Beaulieu, compels Chevalier into a response that suggests his guilt, and signals to the public Kelly-Anne’s cognitive turn toward emotional distress.
From these acts, it is reasonable to infer two character effects: first, the cumulative weight of Mme. Beaulieu’s verbal and non-verbal reactions have deeply affected Kelly-Anne, as her provocations seem to mirror deeply-held emotions for Beaulieu and her daughter and stirs a strategic antipathy for Chevalier. Second, though we do not see too much of the murder videos, we do witness, however, its explicit impact on some of the court attendees, and so we expect that watching these videos has impacted Kelly-Anne in some profound way.
Further, this sub theme of risk and exposure is deepened when Kelly-Anne must take a picture of her face and send this proof of identity to the dark marketers in order to bid on the unseen video of the Beaulieu daughter’s murder. Prior to winning the bid, Kelly-Anne shows two videos of the other victims’ torture-murders to Clementine; Clementine decides that she has seen enough and departs Kelly-Anne’s world. In this part, Kelly-Anne’s choices has lost her a prized job, and she proceeds to spiral into deeper forms of distress.
As Clementine pivots against Chevalier, Kelly-Anne quietly breaches the Beaulieu home at night dressed (one more time) in the school uniform to quietly take selfies on the murdered teen’s bed and leaves (presumably) a copy of the third torture-murder video for a sleeping Mme. Beaulieu. This final act dramatizes Kelly-Anne’s extreme psychological distress but also serves as a prelude to her strategic resilience in helping the prosecution. The film suggests that the selfies mirror what Kelly-Anne wants to see of herself (as the living daughter of a loving mother?) and that she leaves the video for Mme. Beaulieu because Kelly-Anne believes that the mother must see her daughter’s murder in order to achieve public justice for her.
Plante’s filmic style is complex, and there is much needed structure and cohesion to his work. In scene after scene, Plante directs with a nice maturity and great command. His direction is stylishly catalogic, illustrating many details that help illustrate the tension between Kelly-Anne’s complex worlds, but the film falters in its reluctance to explain more deeply Kelly-Anne’s choices. Her actions lack the psychological context needed to fully understand her motivations. But the film does suggest that an empathic understanding for both criminals and victims should have sensible boundaries because hyper-empathy is too toxic by far. A good point to be sure, but we are left to surmise that Kelly-Anne possesses some trauma, and we’re too unsure about her past (and pre-existing conditions) to comprehend how they influence her strategic choices.
The cast does reasonably well with the complicated material. McCabe-Lokos composes Chevalier mostly with cliched posturing, nail cleaning, and intense staring, but he does squeeze one good moment out of a stereotypical, villainous role, and Babin modulates well between irritancy, vulnerability, and sympathy for Clementine. Though there is not enough illumination of Kelly-Anne, Gariépy plays a difficult role delicately on one hand and remotely on the other, but the problem is that Plante keeps her backstory too unclear, and this lack of clarity adds to the film’s main problem because, in this case, more discernible character lines of cause and effect are more desirable than not for a character study.
David Ryan is Academic Director and Faculty Chair of the Master of Arts in Professional Communication at the University of San Francisco. He’s published widely on rhetoric and film studies and is the co-editor of David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (FDU Press, 2022).