Red Rooms (2023)
Curiosity is the real killer.
Presentation:
Who says indie films can’t push the bar? This modern legal thriller has some fascinating cinematography despite being low budget. Shot in 3:2, the modern digital images are juxtaposed with the older dolly and zoom techniques. The camera movement is just fantastic and I love the long lensing, perfectly complementing the voyeuristic themes. This can nearly be considered an experimental film, but I think art house obsession thriller is the best way to describe it. I’m not really sold by the lead, but the atmosphere is so subversive they could have made Gal Gadot look mysterious. This is absolutely one of those enigmatic ambiguous films that you will be talking and researching about.
Analysis:
This is a film about obsession. At first Clementine is obsessed with the defendant, then it is revealed that it is actually Kelly-Anne who is most obsessed. Off screen, we receive small clues of this including how her clients thought she was too edgy, her cyber stalking, and most strangely when she knows exactly the time in a 30 minute video when the killer looks directly into the camera. It becomes overt in the climatic reveal when she starts dressing like the victim and even taking selfies in her home. She is characterized as having a calculating mind with proficiency in computers, stocks, and poker (he all-inned me with queen ten, honey!), but I think all of this is simply a red herring to make her personality twist more shocking. It obviously doesn’t make any sense for her to dress up like the victim, confusing audiences in the hopes that people will conjure some ambiguous intellectual argument to fill in the holes. She is revealed to be an obsessive psycho for the sake of shock factor. What she does represent is the obsessive nature of trials, Stockholm Syndrome, where finding justice is perhaps secondary to the satisfaction of finding the truth and control/vigilantism. Just like in poker, she slowly makes her victim bleed out, but in this case she cosplays as the victim. I don’t think it was to provoke the killer to elicit the truth, she has no empathy and feels she has every right to inject into other people’s cases and homes. Kelly-Anne is a foil to Clementine, whom has a very different appearance, personality, and loyalty to Chevalier. She also has self inflicted cuts to her thigh, illustrating mental health problems. This illustrates that the director’s central theme is on mental health rather than some social justice commentary.
Conclusion:
I honestly didn’t think Canada had it in them, this was a breath of fresh air! At first I was let down by the ambiguity, I even felt robbed of a decent resolution because the reveal is such a WTF moment it was like a cheat. But after some time mulling it over, I was curious and thought about it more, and then wanted to talk to others about it. And at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that really matters for an ambiguity film.
Recommendations
Curiosity is the real killer.