Red Rooms (2023)

Pascal Plante's Red Rooms arrives from Montreal with a cast drawn entirely from Quebec's own talent pool, a fact that registers as geography instead of a representational statement. Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne, a fashion model who spends her days in a courtroom watching Ludovic Chevalier stand trial for broadcasting the murders of three teenage girls. The film is built around a woman, and several women surround her, yet the screenplay has no gendered thesis to advance. It is a study of obsession and self-erasure, and the camera watches Kelly-Anne the way she watches the defendant: without comment, without instruction.

The machinery of the plot involves the dark web, bitcoin, and an auction for the final snuff film, a marketplace where human suffering is priced and sold to the highest bidder. A viewer braced for a sermon about late capitalism will wait in vain. Plante observes the transaction with the same flat affect he brings to everything else, and the result is amoral, unsettling, and entirely uninterested in your politics. Clementine, the younger fan who hitchhikes to Montreal and defends the accused, is described as neurotic. That is a personality, not a cause.

The ledger of contemporary social concern comes up nearly empty. Race is absent as a subject. The environment goes unmentioned. No character wrestles with body image, and the film's interest in queerness is nonexistent. What remains is a cold procedural about a woman who destroys her own life to deliver a flash drive, and a final act that refuses to tell us why. Red Rooms does not lecture. It sits in the dark with you and says nothing. That silence is the most disturbing thing in it, and the reason it will outlast most of its more earnest contemporaries.