PASCAL PLANTE | CANADA | 2023 | 118 MIN | R | FRENCH 

Official Selection of PFF32! Perched in a bland apartment tower overlooking Montreal, part-time model and professional online poker player Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) leads a life of eerily disciplined detachment. For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, Kelly-Anne has become engrossed in the case of Ludovic Chevalier, a man accused of torturing and killing three girls while livestreaming his grisly exploits on the dark web. Faithfully attending the sensational murder trial day after day, Kelly-Anne joins a coterie of the accused’s “groupies,” including wide-eyed Clementine (Laurie Babin), a fellow trial vulture who proclaims Chevalier’s innocence with unsettling certainty. As she grows increasingly obsessed with various aspects of the case—from one of the victim’s grieving mothers, to the whereabouts of his last, undiscovered “red room” video—cracks begin to form in Kelly-Anne’s steely armor. Directed with bravura technical precision and ingenuity by Pascal Plante, Red Rooms is a techno-giallo for our isolated, true-crime-obsessed times. It’s a horror movie that’s all the more terrifying because the violence occurs only in our imaginations, and because the truly diabolical figure isn’t the killer himself, but his bloodthirsty audience.

Cast: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos