Red Rooms review – fashion model fixates on a serial-killer in unsettling dark-web horror

A lead performance of pure sociopathic intensity is what makes this serial-killer horror stand out. It is a movie which never shows the horrific violence on screen and prefers to stay largely within the rhetorical limits of courtroom procedural, though with a shiver of revulsion that could put you in mind of Cronenberg or Refn. Canadian film-maker Pascale Plante writes and directs, and relative newcomer Juliette Gariépy is genuinely unsettling as Kelly-Anne, a fashion model who has become obsessed with the ongoing trial of an alleged serial killer (Maxwell McCabe-Locas). Nicknamed the Demon of Rosemont, he is accused of kidnapping and torturing three teenage girls in a so-called “red room”, an urban-mythic place on the dark web where livestreamed snuff porn can supposedly be watched in exchange for cryptocurrency payment.

Kelly-Anne camps out all night outside Montreal’s Palais de justice – although she always looks very good for someone who’s been sleeping rough – just so she can get a ringside seat in the public gallery. This very beautiful young woman is almost incandescent with her silent, suppressed euphoria at the grotesque horror outlined in the case, and Plante’s camera roams with studied blankness all over the courtroom as the lawyers make their case, pausing to look at the accused, pausing to look at Kelly-Anne herself.

It is with the same cool detachment that Plante shows Kelly-Anne’s home life: she lives all alone in a luxury apartment, and speaks only to her agent and to the Siri-type computer voice which does her bidding. She has no family or friends, and her one interest outside this grotesque case is internet poker at which she is frighteningly good, with a serial-killer’s pleasure at crushing her opponents. Kelly-Anne befriends another public-gallery regular called Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a serial-killer groupie whose presence in court enrages Francine Beaulieu (Elisabeth Locas), the grief-stricken mother of one of the victims. But really, Kelly-Anne is utterly alone and her simple presence on screen, often gazing directly into the camera, is genuinely disquieting. She is far scarier than the man in the dock.

But the film feels inauthentic in the sleight-of-hand way it invites you to believe that if even if red rooms don’t exist – and there is no evidence that they do – they probably will very soon. There is something too easy and credulous about all of this. There is also something too easy about that all-purpose figure who is always being wheeled out in movies and fiction: the brilliant hacker with a supernatural gift for finding things out using a laptop and thus conveniently advancing the plot, a modern-day Merlin who is above the natural laws that apply to all the other characters. All of that shouldn’t take away, though, from what is an outstanding performance from Gariépy.

• Red Rooms is in UK cinemas from 6 September.