Red Rooms.

Prepare for a post-watch glaze fest and all the trigger warnings for this movie.

I just got done watching Red Rooms and was totally blown away.. A French Canadian film directed by Pascal Plante and starring Juliette Gariepy in a monumental feature performance, Red Rooms is an intense chiller portraying the depths of one character's dark obsession with illicit activity and imagery on the deep web. The film centers around our main character's peripheral interactions with the trial of a man accused of murdering three young girls and filming it. It is a jarring and gripping character study of someone who at first may seem somewhat sympathetic as a loner losing herself in the grim human interest stories of the day. She is highly intelligent and gorgeous, a professional model, but spends all her free time online.

This may sound like many movies you've seen before. There is a whole genre of film dedicated to people bearing witness to recordings of the worst atrocities and how it warps the minds of even the innocent and increases the desire of the sadist for more voyeuristic human suffering. This movie is not very interested in the innocence or malevolence of Kelly-Anne's character. We see throughout the movie there is something deeply off about her. She stands at a distance from everyone else, not for the sake of independence, but because she is quite simply a little fuckin' freak.

The filmmaking is magnificent. There isn't a lot of busy cinematography but everything looks sleek, clean, intentional. There are a lot of up close and medium shots of people just reacting to what they're watching, and you too become the person staring into screen as you watch others watching. It's highly voyeuristic, creepy, but not overbearing. The movie seemed to be marketed as kind of an edge of your seat thriller, but most of this movie is very cold.

Until it isn't. The last 30 minutes of this movie had me dropping my jaw multiple times. I admit to a SLIGHT feeling of relatability for Kelly- Anne. First off, she is indeed gorgeous. Had this movie been of a schlubby looking male it would be completely different, and I think that's intentional. The fathoms to which our protagonist plunges in the final act of this was truly shocking. It had me cringing in discomfort and staring agog in fits and turns.

The marketing department of Longlegs really wanted us to believe that it was the bearer of the 90s cerebral thrillers like Silence of the Lambs or Seven, but this movie truly pulled off that vibe, without resorting to homage or pastiche. It kicks the shit out of Joel Schumacher's 8MM, which I feel like many compare it to. I always enjoyed that movie's vibe but felt it didn't go far enough to capture the full weight of the subject. I do not think the writer or director of Red Rooms is directly alluding to True Detective, but it mimics the wise writing choice of treating CA material as a kind of Necronomicon. Viewing it takes something from you, it opens up a gravity well of madness in your mind which grows stronger the more you look. It is the greatest proof humans have of the existence of Hell.

Red Rooms is not all about the CA side of things though. Itis about the main character and it succeeds by never judging her. There is even a relationship in the movie that felt touching, some last tether to normalcy Kelly-Anne. If there is any positive takeaway from the movie, it is to not isolate yourself away from the world. If you've got brainrot, and we've all got brainrot, fucking clean it. Don't think you stand apart from everyone. Everyone is strange, has odd fascinations, craves secrecy and anonymity to some degree. Also, stop listening to true crime podcasts, you weird little perverts.