Horror Wednesday: Les chambres rouges

In Alfred Tennyson’s 19th century lyrical ballad “The Lady of Shalott”, Elaine of Astolat lives in a tower near the legendary castle and court of King Arthur. Cursed, she must weave on her loom but can never look directly at the world outside her window, instead watching people passing on the busy road to Camelot through reflected images in a mirror. “Half-sick of shadows”, she sees Sir Lancelot, her mirror cracks, she escapes her tower, finds a boat and floats down the river towards Camelot, but dies before her arrival.
Kelly-Anne (played by an arresting Juliette Gariépy, the entire venture of the film depending on not being able to look away from her), uses Lady of Shalott as her username on the dark web. Her screen background is John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of the lady, lying dead or dying on the boat, the painting saturated with gloomy ochre-greenish colours that give everything a sickly pallor. Her AI assistant is named Guenièvre, after another character of Arthurian legend, wife of Arthur and lover of Lancelot. Guenièvre has been reprogrammed from her factory settings, improved from the flaws imparted in an entity that has been raised on the digital wastelands of online forums, and is, for the first part of the film, the only voice that Kelly-Anne deliberately communicates with. In her sparse apartment, with light emitting primarily from her double-screen, it isn’t difficult to see the parallels to Tennyson’s heroine. The mirror through which life is reflected is her screen, and with the exception of the photo shoots she attends (where in turn, she is captured to be mirrored on a screen herself), her entire social life unfolds there.
The exception is the trial. We begin the film following Kelly-Anne into the courtroom, disoriented because there are no markers as to what is unfolding. She has spent the night sleeping on the street, but doesn’t look like she does so frequently. She is clothed in an almost Gibson-esque – Cayce Pollard Units outfit, broken up only by a small cross. As she takes her seat on the spectator benches and watches a man emerge to sit in an isolated glass chamber, her face remains inscrutable. The prosecutor gives a harrowing introduction to the trial, outlining how the man in the dock is accused of torturing, raping and killing three teenagers and livestreaming the horror to paying customers on the dark web (it's an update to the conclusion of Olivier Assayas' Demonlover, perfected through technology). Her introductory remarks are emotional, preparing viewers along with the jury for the abominable details that will follow as the trial continues over two months. She has seen two of the videos, been made witness to unmitigated violence that is impossible to keep away from her dreams – and it is now her job to inflict upon those tasked with delivering a verdict in court what she has gone through.

Plante is preoccupied with the question of seeing and witnessing violence: there is the prosecutors outraged description of how it has changed her, there are the anonymous viewers of the red rooms who have paid for being able to access the material, there are the reactions in the court room, witnessed through the doors by Kelly-Anne and Clementine (Laurie Babin), who have been sent outside as spectators but hear the screams through the closed doors, see the mother of one of the victims leaving in horror, and finally watch the medics arrive for someone who has collapsed from the violence of the images. There is an obligation to witness for the jury, to comprehend the crime and follow along with evidence given that identifies the masked man in the videos by his eyes and stance as the accused Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). There is something else, not an obligation but a compulsion, in Kelly-Anne for having traced the videos on the dark web and watched them herself, a revelation that changes the course of the film.
Kelly-Anne’s inscrutability is juxtaposed with Clementine’s openness about her motivation for following the trial. She is convinced that Chevalier is innocent, not based on any evidence that she has of his character, but because she has projected innocence on him, and no amount of factual evidence can change her mind. She insists that everything the prosecution presents is fake – that the videos are photoshopped, that the identification of Chevalier under the mask is a lie, that the whole trial is a conspiracy against an innocent man. She has never spoken to him, and has no pre-existing relationship: she is a true crime groupie, but not in the sense of emotionally connecting with who she knows is a killer. Instead, she has constructed a fantasy in which whatever is presented in court is incapable of proving Chevalier’s guilt.
Clementine also assumes, as she begins trailing Kelly-Anne and essentially forcing a connection through persistence, that Kelly-Anne attends the trial for the same reason, an assumption that Kelly-Anne never confirms or denies. She gives nothing away, but her embrace of Clementine comes as a surprise: it feels tender, somehow, for a character who is so essentially isolated to make these attempts at friendship, to break out of the routine we have seen her follow: work-outs, online poker, an appointment to be photographed, using her AI assistant to respond to emails. Clementine is invited to sleep over, to share a pizza, is gifted a racket to play squash, where Kelly-Anne, instead of ridiculing her inaptness, insists on coaching her to some success. Kelly-Anne explains that she makes her money from online poker tournaments, and it’s the first time that she seems to give something away of herself. She targets emotional players and takes them for all they have, exploiting their weakness. Clementine, half-jokingly, calls her evil for it, but it’s as close to a hint at what is going on as we’ll get. 

As a film that is so concerned about the consequences of bearing witness to violence through a screen, the turning point of the story, the moment where it gathers momentum, comes after Clementine realises that Kelly-Anne has access to the torture videos. Remember that Clementine has insisted that these videos are not real, are part of the conspiracy to convict an innocent man, or that if they are real, they do not show what the prosecutor is insisting they do. She wants to bear witness herself, and I think that Kelly-Anne is torn between knowing that Clementine will not be able to bear it, and wanting someone else to share the experience of watching them with her, even though it is clear from their entire interaction that they are very different people. They go back to Kelly-Anne’s apartment, and watch the videos in front of her screens. Bathed in the red light from the videos, their reactions unfold in contrast. Plante makes the decision to stay on their faces – again, the only thing breaking through to the viewers are the horrible sounds of the torture. The point here is not to titillate the viewer with the gore that has been described in detail by the prosecutor, but to show the effect that it has on the characters. In an earlier courtroom scene, the director documents the effects of seeing the artifacts of violence when the prosecutor creates a trilogy of images for the mother of one of the victims: it starts with a school picture, the details of the girl’s uniform, then turns to pictures of just the uniform as discovered by the forensic team, covered in blood, and then, in a glimpse that disappears almost immediately but still has the searing quality of something that cannot be unseen, a decomposing jaw. In showing this image to the mother, even if just for a moment, the prosecutor wants not only to make a point about identification (the retainer that her daughter was wearing), but to elicit an emotional response from her, and in turn from the jury, seeing her reaction. Not dissimilarly, Kelly-Anne watches the video and her reaction to it is detached, clinical, accustomed to violence or maybe capable of seeing it from a distance because it unfurls on a screen. She focuses on the kind of details that the investigators trying to identify the killer would have had to see: the eyes, the gait, the arms of the perpetrator. Meanwhile, next to her, Clementine cannot bear it. She closes her eyes, she cries. She is horrified, and essentially, incapable of insisting that the video is fake now that she has witnessed it, and incapable of insisting on her belief that Chevalier is innocent. The images have fundamentally changed her, and in seeing that Kelly-Anne remains the same, she leaves (the apartment, but ultimately also the narrative for the most part, except for a bit at the end where she attempts to explain herself in a talk show). The connection that the two women forged over an assumed similarity has been irreversibly severed, and Kelly-Anne is back to being alone with Guenièvre (who is changed by the experience of having encountered Clementine, and now tells jokes and has the vibes of having an unsettling amount of insight into Kelly-Anne).

There is another interesting parallel here to the story of The Lady of Shalott and her mirror. Kelly-Anne interacts with the world through her screen, but in her awareness of data security or lack of it – she hacks the emails of the mother of one of the victims to retrieve the code for a door lock, to be used later – she seems unreflected by the screens. She sees through them, but they do not see her, even when her image appears on fashion sites, where she is changed through make-up and outfits. The warning that a technical expert gives in the trial haunts her. He describes investigators as hackers who follow the trails of those committing crimes on the dark web, who are doomed to make mistakes eventually. Forewarned, Kelly-Anne’s project, which comes into view in the second part of the film, after Clementine’s departure, feels precarious and dangerous, as if in descending into the abyss and trying to buy the missing video file in an online auction, the abyss is looking back at her. She is asked to take a photograph of herself, and her image suddenly appears, ominously, seen through the video cameras of the lobby and the court house. Her inscrutability, her invisibility, is compromised through the same channels that she uses so expertly. That concept is interesting here because in a way, Kelly-Anne is morally compromised already by her ability to watch the video unflinchingly, to regard violence without having an emotional reaction to it. A mirror does not just reflect the outside world, but also the person looking into it.

Early on when they meet, Clementine tells Kelly-Anne that if she were younger and had blonde hair and blue eyes, she would be the exact kind of person the killer targets. As she is pursuing the third video, Kelly-Anne enters the courtroom in a wig, wearing a school uniform under her coat. In the courtroom, she puts in a retainer. The mother sees her, horrified, and she is removed, but the point of the exercise is to see Chevalier’s reaction – a man, who throughout the film shows little emotion, and gives nothing away. He leers at her. He waves, as she leaves. If there had been any doubt as to his culpability, it is now resolved.
Plante’s stated inspiration for this film was his fascination with women becoming serial killer groupies and becoming obsessed with true crime narratives, which predominantly document horrors that happen to women. It’s clear how Clementine fits into this narrative, but Kelly-Anne’s involvement is thornier. I’ve gone back and forth on what her motivation is: she ends up with the video, leaves it in the mother’s house like the worst gift that a cat could possibly give as a present, and forwards the elusive trail of bitcoin for the investigators, leading to Chevalier’s conviction. In the process, she annihilates herself in all the ways that she has existed before: her career as a model is over, she destroys her phone and personal assistant, she is absent, in the end, when the Montreal skyscape dissolves into the fuzziness of a lagging videostream. Was her goal to insert herself into the investigation itself, by extending her stance towards poker into this horrendous crime, trumping emotional players with calculation and focus? Did she apply her specific talents to prove that she could, conveniently filling all the gaps pointed out by the defendant’s lawyer, thereby proving his guilt without any reasonable doubt? Chevalier, the knight, has irrevocably changed her, has tempted her out of her tower, has cracked the mirror, and she is left drifting in the boat towards a place she may never reach alive – but maybe Plante doesn’t have to spell that out for us.


2023, directed by Pascal Plante, starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.