Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. I watched a fairly appropriate movie for the day recently, 2023's Red Rooms, a French Canadian movie about a fashion model obsessed with a man who's on trial and for the killing of three teenage girls. The gruesome footage of his killings, which had been posted on the dark web, are part of the evidence used against him. It's an effectively creepy film and an intriguing character study of the unusual woman at the centre of it.
Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy) is a very comic-bookish character, she's almost like a variant of Batgirl. She's a beautiful fashion model whose primary income comes from online gambling, which she's a genius at. She's also made herself an AI sidekick whom she's named Guinevere. But while Batgirl's motives would be clear from the start, Red Rooms allows Kelly-Anne's motives to remain a mystery for most of the film. Maybe she's more of a Catwoman. She's shot as the point-of-view character but we're kept at some distance from her. The audience is compelled to fill in the blanks by how they react to the scenes unfolding. Is Kelly-Anne trying to fight crime, or is this just a fetish for her?
We're invited to sympathise more with Clementine (Laurie Babin), an innocent, guileless girl who's developed a fixation on the man on trial and believes he's been framed. This fixation is so clearly mixed up with Clementine's anxiety and sexuality as a young misfit just entering adulthood that it's easy to sympathise with her. Kelly-Anne becomes more human thanks to her very natural but somewhat reluctant compulsion to take Clementine under her wing.
There's a robust history of films that probe the line between repulsion and attraction, for crime and other things. This is a elegant, handsomely shot example with good performances.
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