In the Flesh: Red Rooms

To paraphrase another great North American, there is an idea of a Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), some kind of abstraction, but though you can shake her hand and feel flesh gripping yours, she simply is not there. Gariépy is magnificent in the role of this dead-eyed ghoul, a model and online poker shark who watches snuff films of teenage girls without emotion and toys with the people around her like a spider testing the strands of its web, feeling for vibrations to guide it toward its next meal. The only things she seems to feel are anxiety and sadistic impulses to crush and mutilate anyone she can, to exert power for its own sake, to consume as much misery as she can, to embody and reflect that pain back onto the world. In perhaps the film’s single most stunning sequence she dresses herself to resemble teenage murder victim Camille Beaulieu and shows herself to the girl’s shattered, grieving mother (Elisabeth Locas) in court, causing a sudden uproar. The girlish fake braces, the contacts she uses to simulate Camille’s doe-eyed gaze, the twitching smile she shows while being dragged out of the courtroom — it’s nauseating in its intensity.

Subtler but equally repulsive is a scene in which Kelly-Anne, once again disguised as Camille, enters the Beaulieu household by night and photographs herself in Camille’s bedroom. The white snap of the flash etches her hauntingly lovely features into something that looks like it crawled out of an Iron Age burial mound, ravaged and gaunt, eyes like cracked black marbles stuffed rudely into drooping sockets. Director Pascal Plante isn’t subtle about showing us the monster behind Kelly-Anne’s conventional facade, and his directness pays dividends in concert with Gariépy’s frankly astonishing physical and facial commitment to the role. Her crushing anxiety as she bids for the only available video file of Camille’s torture and murder in one of the titular “red rooms”, a term for a shooting location used to produce snuff films, is the most emotion we ever see out of her, elicited not by the sight of unimaginable atrocities but by the possibility that she won’t get to see them. When she does, her beatific joy is bathed in glaringly unsubtle crimson lighting, reminding us that the killer’s lair isn’t the only red room on display here.

Red Rooms is deeply interested in questions of complicity, identity, and anonymity as they pertain to the grotesque. From Clementine’s (Laurie Babin) delusional fixation on Chevalier’s (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) innocence to Kelly-Anne’s terrarium of an identity, fed and watered by her modeling, composted with the remains of her emotional victims, to the world-weary acceptance of the old man who found the bodies of Chevalier’s victims buried in his yard, we’re asked again and again just where the line between the normal and aberrant should be drawn when we relate to tragedy and violence. The prosecutor (Natalie Tannous) uses graphic imagery deployed in carefully timed bursts to shape her witnesses and their testimony with the aim of punishing Chevalier. If Kelly-Anne is the one who turns in the incriminating evidence in the film’s final moments, is her voyeuristic pleasure at having reveled in Camille’s death distinct from those actions? If so, how, and why? There are no easy answers here, only Kelly-Anne staring back at us, sometimes directly into the camera, smiling, bathed in red.