Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is a transgressive, tension wrought serial killer cyber-thriller

Courtesy Nemesis Films

A wave of new dark web flicks have been hitting our inbox lately. The cycle comes like clockwork every ten years or so, wherein a leap in tech is sort of new and fantastical—thus a great jumping-off point for horror, sci-fi, and thrillers. But then it comes back around again when that same technology becomes part of everyday life. Picture the leap from The Net and Hackers being in theaters and the jump to films like Unfriended; followed by the wave of pandemic Zoom-style films that were both mainstream by the nature of everyone spending too much time in those digital townhalls and/or filmmaking being reduced to severely restricted measures.

That’s all to point toward a slate of movies either in theaters or coming soon that take a starting point from understanding that the dark web is no longer some unspecific evil fantasy zone, the playground of only high-end blackhats and espionage agents. Rather, you’re probably looking at a situation where every friend group has at least one person who uses a Tor browser like the rest of us go to Chrome. Maybe your cousin is equally online in that way where you know you can ask them to find things that Normal Internet would prefer to keep hidden. The permeability and prevalence allow for a feeling that, when a movie in 2024 is telling you that regular people have access to The Unspeakable, the threat seems less hollow and more disturbingly pedestrian.

Director Pascal Plante’s new techno-thriller Red Rooms uses illegal internet spaces the way that another film would simply use a second location, like a bar or a party. Events from the physical, daily world are playing out in both the analog and the digital—pushing an accelerationist dread that comes off as true crime rather than bleakly predictive. The point of Red Rooms is not that cruelty and vileness can find life in the ether, but instead that the heightened horrors of futurist nightmares have already come home to take root.

Courtesy Nemesis Films

Red Rooms follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a supermodel who eschews her high-end apartment to spend her nights sleeping on the street. [Ed note: I can feel you walking away after hearing that the setup involves a supermodel hacker; I promise you it works better than you’d think.] Kelly-Anne is obsessed with the trial of an accused serial killer (played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) whose brutal court case makes each day into a traumafest as bloody, horrifying evidence is introduced and shown to the families of his victims.

Spending all day in the courthouse forces her into close proximity with another watcher obsessed with the case—Clementine (Laurie Babin) who is more of a groupie, set out to defend the reputation of man she has never met, in a case she personally knows nothing about.

A bizarre friendship forms between the two observers, whose perspectives and missions are as diametrically opposed as their perception of the accused and his crimes. Something approaching camaraderie forms and soon the two are living together as roommates—pursuing their own detective work around the case’s missing pieces in their spare time. Plumbing the depths of a digital underworld in search of forensic evidence around the rape and murder of children takes a predictable toll on both women, but where their fracture psyches take them next is an escalating thriller about justice, hyper fixation, revenge, and the very nature the future of the criminal justice process.

Director Pascal Plante takes a taut script and turns it into a striking, challenging portrait of True Crime culture that avoids the over-tread territory “obsession with other people is problematic” and goes straight for “what if this is destroying us from the inside?” The entire run time of the film plays out in claustrophobic tension, where even the shock of brutal violence almost serves as a reprieve from the breathless stress of all that has come before.

It’s rare to find a feature that is simply “though.” Tough to make it through, tough to stomach, tough to process, tough to even move through its space. It’s the highest compliment I can offer towards a film that packs the worst of mankind into one tight little package, and shoves the audience in for good measure.

Red Rooms is out in limited theatrical release now with more information, including streaming releases, announced here.