Red Rooms
This beguiling psychological thriller withholds many of its mysteries, but its steely central performance from Juliette Gariépy keeps you hooked
Pascal Plante’s hypnotic new film follows a young woman named Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) as she follows the murder trial of an accused serial killer. She’s so dedicated to the case that she sleeps outside the courtroom each night to make sure she gets a spot in the gallery. After each session, she returns home to sit at her computer, using multiple screens and a voice-activated AI to shuffle between news stories about the case, work emails about modelling jobs and the online poker rooms where she racks up winnings. It's the sort of solitary existence we’ve seen in countless neo-noir films, though usually with a man at the centre – a lonely, Spartan life lived almost entirely by night and dedicated to a single purpose. Except we don’t know the purpose.
Red Rooms often feels like one of Kelly-Anne’s expertly played poker games, with all the tension contained in the things that we can’t see. It’s incredible how compelling a tale the film is able to tell while withholding the most basic information. Even as we tick towards the final minutes of the film, we still aren’t really sure who Kelly-Anne is or what she wants. Gariépy’s steely central performance gives away nothing in a way that makes us want to know everything.
And, even if the answers we finally get perhaps aren’t quite as satisfying as we’d hoped, the eerily confident, quietly efficient way that both she and the film go about their business makes for a beguiling spectacle.
Released 6 Sep by Vertigo; certificate 18