‘Red Rooms’ and the Web’s Intrusive Thoughts
Sociopathy on main.
Red Rooms, a French-Canadian film that made the festival rounds in 2023 before finally hitting video-on-demand in October of this year, is oddly disturbing.
Not because of the subject matter; the subject matter is straightforwardly disturbing. Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is on trial for killing three young girls and livestreaming their torture and murder to miscreants on the dark web in a so-called “Red Room,” a previously mythical phenomenon. Stoically watching the trial is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), an online poker player and fashion model; she takes one of Chevalier’s groupies, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), under her wing when she finds out the girl is functionally homeless.
As I said, this is all disturbing on its face. Dead kids, the dark web, serial-killer groupies: grim stuff, not for the faint of heart. But in contrast to what, perhaps, a technician like David Fincher might do or a provocateur like Lars von Trier certainly would do, writer-director Pascal Plante very carefully never shows anything that might be considered salacious on our screen. This is not an Eli Roth film like Hostel; we are not privy to the visual contents of the snuff films at the heart of Chevalier’s trial, though we do occasionally hear the screams of the girls on the other side of the screen, the whirring of a drill. We see the detritus of these killings during the trial: bloodied clothes, decomposed braces, etc. But there’s nothing in this film that couldn’t be shown on network TV. (Maybe basic cable; there are a few curse words.)
What makes the film oddly disturbing rather than straightforwardly disturbing is the way Pascal withholds information from the viewer. Visual information like the tapes themselves, yes, but also emotional information. Rather than holding the audience’s hand by having Kelly-Anne explain her motivations throughout, she remains stoic, nearly impassive. We see her hack the email and router and doorbell of the mother of one of the victims—the only girl whose snuff film was never recovered—but it’s not clear why she’s doing this. Or even, honestly, why she’s at the trial at all. She doesn’t appear to be a groupie like Clémentine, but midway through the film she shows up to court dressed as one of the victims. Just to spark a response from Chevalier? To get his attention? To torment the dead girl’s mother? To what end?
The blankness on Kelly-Anne’s face persists even as she watches the two snuff films circulating on the dark web before the trial begins. And while I won’t reveal what Kelly-Anne does at the end of the film, it’s worth highlighting that her final actions are a beguiling mixture of sociopathy and restorative justice that do little to solve the paradox at the heart of the picture: that the internet breeds a sort of amoral sadism, and also that it might be impossible to fight that sadism without losing some piece of your soul. The best, healthiest response—as we see from our final look at Clémentine, who has a heartier glow about her following her decision to stop watching the case than any time we’ve seen her onscreen previously—is to reject all this insanity entirely.
Juror #2, Clint Eastwood’s latest, is another film that grapples with guilt and social culpability, albeit with less social media. (I doubt Eastwood is a big dark web guy.) I hope you listen to our Across the Movie Aisle bonus episode about it. And if you’re not a member yet, no time like the present to sign up.
I recently rewatched FearDotCom, the 2002 horror flick from director William Malone, which got the high-quality Blu-ray treatment from Vinegar Syndrome partner Dark Star earlier this year. I’ve always had a soft spot for this and Malone’s previous directorial feature, House on Haunted Hill (1999), despite the fact that the film’s understanding of how the web works (and even looks) was, well, unsophisticated.
FearDotCom actually shares some plot elements with Red Rooms. The 2002 film also concerns snuff films proliferating on the internet, positing a haunted website that essentially “infects” victims with a virus of the mind, causing them to kill themselves. Again, this is all a little silly, but I’d suggest that one thing the film and the filmmaker intuitively grasped about the internet is the society-deforming aspect of it all, the ways in which granting universal access to the most horrifying stuff imaginable would be degrading to user and social system alike. It’s not just the existence and consumption of this sort of thing that is troubling; it’s creating spaces for these sickos to seek one another out and congregate and feed off each other that is the issue.
Early films about the internet often misunderstood how the web worked and/or visualized its operation in unintentionally comic ways—while I love Iain Softley’s 1995 film Hackers, the conception of CPUs as a literal information highway replete with skyscrapers was, at the least, kind of funny—but they also understood that the combination of virtually bringing people together and isolating them in their own spaces was a sort of petri dish for social disaster. The seminal 2001 Japanese horror film Kairo (which translates to Pulse; not to be confused with the 2006 remake of Kairo named Pulse starring Kristen Bell) keys in on just this idea: Ghosts prey upon the lonely and the isolated, showing them images of death and suffering to induce them to kill themselves and join the ranks of the paranormal army invading (living) Tokyo.
The idea of ghosts trapped on the internet seeking out more lonely souls to hijack, to corrupt, to join the hive mind of despair is one that has stuck with me over the years as the internet has grown from a niche service to a useful tool to an all-encompassing part of life, a constant companion in our pockets ready to distract us at a moment’s notice. The rise of social media in particular—and the ways in which certain services reward a sort of competitive sociopathy—leaves me with the unshakeable belief that however silly some of those early movies about the internet may have been, artists were correct to intuitively grasp that it is a dangerous, potentially destructive, social evolution.
All of this comes to mind as I watch repeated videos of a man being executed on a New York City street, autoplayed on social media, shared by jeering, leering denizens of Twitter and every other social platform, folks who are saying out loud that it is Good, Actually, that a man be killed because health care providers are a pain in the ass to deal with. (One can only imagine how the film John Q would play today.) I am by no means immune to this sort of thing—I am vocally in favor of terrorists getting blown up by their own pagers; I have joked about using drones to end the scourge of film piracy—but I am struck by the way we have come to not only accept seeing videos of men shot, of soldiers blown up on a battlefield, of bodies dragged from collapsed buildings, but to use them as cudgels in our cubicle crusades, to self-righteously share them as if it’s not weird that snuff films have escaped the Faces of Death ghetto and entered the mainstream.
It sometimes seems as though we’re all watching our own red rooms. I cannot help but feel as though there is a price to pay for doing so.
"... folks who are saying out loud that it is Good, Actually, that a man be killed because health care providers are a pain in the ass to deal with. " That is a bit too flippant Sonny. The pain and anger that's driving such comments is not the same irritation that comes from dealing with your local cable provider who is also a pain in the ass to deal with but rather from suffering physical pain and suffering or watching a loved one suffer because for someone else it's profitable. It would not be hard at all to extend the metaphor of 'red rooms' to the for profit health insurance industry. Personally, I do not cheer or even jest about Thompson's murder. I can however *understand* the enormous pain that drives the anger. Pain is the cultural poison of our time. Lucas had it wrong it is not fear that becomes hate it is pain that drives people into irrational hatred, from mass shooters to Thompson murder (likely but unproven,) to Trump's election the real root cause is pain.
I understand the frustration with the for profit health care industry - but I take no pleasure in the killing of a man who happens to be the CEO of one of those companies. I take no pleasure in vigilante justice. I hate that so many have been praising the killing. I would much rather we implement health care for all and turn any for profit companies remaining into non profit companies. I know people have died due to the decisions of the man's company and others like it. But killing him solves nothing.