Canadian horror about murders on the darknet
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“Red Rooms” is being released, a strange adaptation of an urban horror story about snuff on the darknet. However, despite the presence of screenlife elements in the film, it is rather an homage to the Italian giallo of the 1980s.
Autumn Montreal is in tense anticipation: in court there is a protracted trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a bald asshole with a limp mouth, who, according to the prosecution, kidnapped and dismembered three blonde high school students alive. Moreover, they dismembered them for a reason – but on the live broadcast of the so-called “red room”, an urban legend about the horrors of the Internet (such as the “blue whale”). “We all thought that live streaming of snuff on the darknet was a myth. But here is terrifying evidence! — the female prosecutor says meaningfully. A beautiful brown-haired woman with a Teutonic cross on a chain looks at her from the public bench with a hard-to-read but heavy thought in her eyes. This is Kelly Anne, Lisbeth Salander’s spiritual sister, professional hacker, poker player, athlete and active citizen. She lives in a small apartment in a glass skyscraper, in the company of only a voice assistant named Guinevere, tuned and therefore absolutely safe: if earlier when asked “should I kill myself” Guinevere said “yes”, then after disconnecting from Reddit and Wikipedia is correct. What is Kelly-Ann looking for on the darknet, what does she see in the faces of those gathered in the courtroom?
We will be guessing about this throughout the entire film, the premise of which was done masterfully and contrary to all the laws of plotting. “Red Rooms” begins as a detective story – but the corpses seem to be found (two out of three), the killer seems to be caught, identified using advanced technology. But maybe he was set up? — as little Clementine, an ugly duckling in love with the kind cornflower blue eyes of a potential killer, thinks when Kelly-Ann meets her in court, a strange girl who came to Montreal from a distant province penniless and sleeps on the street. But if they were framed, then by whom? And why does the successful Kelly-Ann, who has money for a taxi, also sleep on the street with her hat pulled down? Why does she peer into the eyes of the mother of one of the victims – the same blue as the killer’s – or the man in a judge’s robe (or does it only seem to us that she is peering)? And who sends spies in a white van to her house? And is Guinevere so loyal to her mistress? The authors of the film do not give the viewer the slightest opportunity to cling to at least some hypothesis, but throw them into a sea of mysteries. The sequence of scenes is not subject to the strict logic of a detective story, but solely to rhythm. But the magnificent, hypnotic work of the cameraman and the clear laconicism of the dramaturgy of the episodes, similar to sketches, captivate, pick up the viewer and carry him – enchanted by pure movement, deprived of will, surrendered to the mercy of the film, from mystery to mystery, into a pool of elegant obscurity
This trick is not new at all—for an experienced moviegoer, “Red Rooms” will vividly remind you of the Italian giallo of the 1970s and 1980s. Everything here, from the melodic and disturbing soundtrack to the romantic-model type of the main character played by Juliette Garepy, brings to life the spirit of that golden era of horror, when the blood on the screen was redder, the interiors were more luxurious, and the ingenuity of the forces of evil bordered even on the dark , but art.
However, nostalgia is squeezed into the strict framework of today’s decency: you will not see a single act of cruelty on the screen. Following the orders of his predecessors, who noticed that imaginary monsters are scarier than anything that can be created in the special effects shop, director Pascal Plante managed to save a lot on artificial blood, and on fake limbs, and on his own imagination too – instead of terrible snuff videos in the frame – close-up of Garepi’s pupil and terrible screams somewhere in the speakers.
The ending is decided in approximately the same spirit, which is not burdensome for the author, quartering the plot, cutting off all promising conspiracy lines and hints in one fell swoop and leaving some kind of shapeless deck before the stunned viewer. This act of brutal murder of all our expectations is, of course, unforgivable. But otherwise, “Red Rooms” looks not only exciting, but also fresh – apparently, largely due to Plante’s uncertainty and inexperience as a storyteller. His plot preparations would be enough for several films: an expressive and tragicomic court drama with a florid lawyer, a progressive prosecutor and a weak-willed sociopath sitting in a glass box; an emancipatory imitation of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise; festival cinema about the phenomenon of waiting people, lovers of serial killers, and post-truth in the world of deepfake; trash horror in the spirit of “Saw”, filming urban folklore; finally, the same giallo about the mysterious murder of schoolgirls. Each of these developments is good in its own way, filled with vital truth and suspense, each is smoothly stitched to the other – and each leads in absurdly tortuous ways to the banal obviousness of a judicial verdict. In principle, constructing a complex garden in place of an extremely simple case is also a completely conventional genre technique; One can recall, for example, the thriller “Mother” by Bong Chun Ho, in which an amateur investigation into the murder of a schoolgirl did not ultimately reveal anything new – except for a panoramic picture of the total decay of the Korean province and the morality “the environment kills.” In the glossy giallo, however, there is nothing to rot, and in its lacquered environment you can only slip – which, in fact, is what happened to Plante.
On the other hand, we were warned. What did we expect when we went to see a film about a murderer whose title is a well-known palindrome of the word murder? For originality?
In theaters from February 29
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