In the French-Canadian film RED ROOMS (2024), a young woman named Kelly-Anne becomes obsessed with a serial killer, leading her down a dark road to track down a missing video depicting the murder of a teen. This movie is a master class in horror, cultivating a morbid sense of revulsion using sound and description instead of shoving it in your face.
The movie begins with the opening statements at a trial. We have the defendant, believed to have murdered three pretty young teens and posted the videos as “red room” snuff videos for profit on the dark web (a new digital take on the old snuff film urban legend of the 1970s). We have the prosecutor laying out the grisly crime in detail, letting our imaginations do the work. And we have Kelly-Anne sitting in the observation area, watching the trial day after day.
Is she a serial killer groupie, a sicko who likes snuff films, or is something else at work? She’s a fascinating character in how she pursues information about the case and probes the dark web herself to plumb the case’s deepest secrets. We find out what she’s been doing all along in a nice twist at the end, though this comes at the expense of never really knowing what drives her, why she does what she does. We’re kept in the dark for a reason, and while it’s a good reason, again, there’s the tradeoff. That one vital piece of storytelling, which is what haunts a character and makes them believe what they believe and need what they need.
That aside, I loved it. I found the story intensely moody, the cinematography and soundtrack great, and the protagonist engaging. I particularly loved the use of sound, spoken description, and human reactions to the torture and murder of the teens, which made the crimes subject to the imagination and therefore all the more grisly and horrific. Overall, I appreciated how RED ROOMS took the tired trope of the serial killer and turned it into something deeply engaging.