Red Rooms

It’s rare to feel the tension built inside a theater to the point where everyone is holding their breath, but Red Room is a unique movie that defies expectations and keeps pulling the audience deeper into the dark abysm of human nature.

The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance.

An open riff on First Blood, with shades of the 1973 Joe Don Baker vehicle Walking Tall, Rebel Ridge also feels like a determined return to the relentlessness of Saulnier’s first films.

In contrast to most movies about serial killers, this one offers nary a glimpse of violence, let alone any wallowing in sadism. Yet somehow that makes it all the more icky — at times the squirm factor is such that you may think no shower could wash a viewer’s taint-by-association away.

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

Nasty stuff—of the sort, lord knows, that I’ve praised plenty in my time. But in this case the return on icky investment just isn’t there.

The Crimson Room of Her Silent Mind: Fear of the Unreadable250208 (3.8)A crimson room belonging to a woman who has lost her language—a mind that is endlessly seen and observed but remains utterly unreadable. We humans fear what we cannot understand. I watched this film barely hanging on, clutching a doll in terror. The story revolves around the high-profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier, the "Demon of Rosemont," accused of three counts of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and the production of "Red Room" snuff films on the Dark Web. His crimes are unspeakable: evisceration, dismemberment, and the live-streaming of these horrors for bitcoin. Despite the gruesome evidence, he has a cult following of groupies who protest his innocence. Among the spectators is Kelly-Anne, a high-fashion model and professional online poker player who lives in a state-of-the-art condo but spends her nights sleeping on the streets outside the courthouse to secure a seat.Kelly-Anne is a chilling enigma. She is an expert hacker who trains her AI assistant, Guenièvre, and navigates the Tor network with ease. She takes in Clementine, a naive groupie who believes Chevalier is being framed, only for Clementine to flee in horror after seeing the reality of the videos. Kelly-Anne’s obsession takes a disturbing turn; she loses her modeling contracts after dressing up as one of the victims—blonde, blue-eyed Camille—and waving to the killer on his birthday. The tension peaks during a high-stakes poker game where she bets everything to win an auction for the missing video of Camille’s death. In the end, she infiltrates the victim's home, takes a selfie in Camille's bedroom while dressed as her, and leaves the video for Camille's mother, providing the definitive evidence for a conviction. Throughout the film, Kelly-Anne barely speaks a word of the French dialogue, remaining an unreadable void. We are never granted access to her true motives—whether she was a fan, an avenger, or something entirely different. This lack of understanding is what makes her truly terrifying.

Wanted to like it a lot more than I did. The trial scenes were rather boring and exposition-filled, cluing you into what actually happened without seeing it. The stuff outside of that is mostly mundane and uneventful. IMO, it ruins a good 15-20 minutes too long. Cut out the filler, quicken up the pace, and I would have thought a little higher of it.

What a disappointing ordeal this was. From a genuinely promising premise (albeit not very subtle with its use of tropes, but these can be justified with the right direction), the movie quickly takes on an awful narrative angle, chosing to focus on an unbelievable relationship involving the main protagonist, who is easily one of the worst offenders in lazy, cliché character development: I won't spoil this truism-fest for you, but she basicaly embodies most of the overdone characters traits of this decade's potboilers, with hints of male-gaze sprinkled on top. Throughout the 2 hour long movie, I held on to the hope that the story would at least finally veer towards an engaging intrigue, as the potential was definitely there... but around the 1 hour mark it became clear that the direction was committed in sticking to this uninspired exploration of its obnoxious main character, each event becoming more and more predictable as the movie progressed to its inevitably underwhelming conclusion. Mashable's "Out-Finchers Fincher" review is objectively an insult, no matter how much one may dislike Fincher's work, and I probably shouldn't even address the Lynch comparisons.

A hollow exercise in ruining a great premise by creating a heroine who has no reason to exist in this vapid story. It attempts to show the darker side of the web via vignettes of a heroine who is as flat as a wall, meandering from scene to meaningless scene, with no rhyme or reason. And then you at least hope it will all come together in a semi-satisfying meaningful way. Let me save you the almost 2 hour running time and tell you, it won't. Art house trash at its finest.

Dull and pretentious attempt at art house thriller. Zero reason to care from start to finish, wondering what the protagonist is even doing or what the point of the journey is. It is ironic when another character asks her this exact question. Obtuse for the sake of it. Another example of the high brow critics finding value in a hollow heap of nothing.