"Red Rooms" (2023/24): Truth Comes Down from Her Tower to Chastise Mankind

Title from the 1896 painting "Truth Coming Out from Her Well Armed with a Whip to Chastise Humanity (La Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité)" by Jean-León Gérôme.

She left the web, she left the loom 

She made three paces thro' the room 

She saw the water-flower bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott.

-- Lord Alfred Tennyson, 1832

Summary

Set in Montréal, Pascal Plante's 2023/24 "Red Rooms" -- which is a frightening enough title if you know about the dark web -- the film begins with an enigmatic character Kelly-Anne, a woman in her mid to late twenties, attending the trial of a serial murderer and rapist, Ludovic Chevalier, while seemingly having no personal involvement in the case. Chevalier is accused of a variety of heinous crimes surrounding his allegedly raping and torturing to death on livestream three teenage girls in exchange for money in the form of cryptocurrency on the dark web (using TOR, an online system of layering data so as to keep IP addresses and ISPs anonymous) in "red rooms." Red rooms, or sites on which rape/torture/murder may be livestreamed for a price, are urban legends. The reason they seemingly don't exist is that data is too slow to be processed through TOR, rendering any kind of discernable livestream impossible.

Chevalier's trial is to determine if, within the videos created and sold and found, the masked torturer/murderer is indeed Chevalier.

Kelly-Anne is a model who spends most of her days and nights in her high-rise apartment, with no friends or family, and who accrues even more income beyond her modeling (in bitcoin, one of the most well-known and frequently used forms of crypto, around which would exist the one hidden link between herself and the case) playing online poker. She's built her own AI, whom she's named Guenièvre. Arthurian motifs play a role in the film, Guenièvre and "Chevalier" (French for "knight") are already implied. Kelly-Anne is a stoic individual and idiosyncratic about health and fitness. She's incredibly skilled at hacking, navigating the web like the Arthurian Lady of Shalott weaves images in her tower.

Toward the end of the dramatic beginning of "Red Rooms" which depicts the commencement of Ludovic's trial, including statements from the judge and the prosecutor and the defense, we see Kelly-Anne (who'd slept on the street in front of the courthouse just so she could secure a spot in the courtroom,     or at least we think that's why, but, perhaps she's compelled not to sleep in her own apartment as per the Lady of Shalott comparison) stare unabashedly and with alarming intensity at Chevalier, who is sitting alone and handcuffed within a bullet-proof booth of his own. Chevalier doesn't look up at anyone. The scene is arresting, with long continuous takes, particularly one lasting twelve minutes. The film itself is shot in the unusual aspect ratio of 1:50:1, a boxy outdated ratio used in VistaVision: this adds a sensation of seeing the events through human eyes. 

Kelly-Anne takes interest in the mother of the one youngest victim, Camille, whose video has not been found by the authorities, and researches the woman and even hacks into her email to find the code to her home's lock system. What she'll do with this information we still don't know.

The protagonist is soon approached by a hybristophile fangirl who, like Kelly-Anne, has attended the trial every day, a young woman named Clémentine. Clémentine is  unstable, having traveled a long distance to attend the trial of a man she deems innocent and framed, believing that as per Canadian law one is innocent until proven guilty. This kind of behavior is common in real life. Killers and more general criminals everywhere and for a long time have tended to have groupies who for various reasons feel romantically or sexually attracted to the idea of men who break basic rules. Maybe she can fix him. Maybe he's no longer a threat and can be romanticized for his depravity without risking being victim to that depravity. Maybe it's evolution, as aggressive and non-empathetic men mean "stronger animals" and better means of protection and strong genes to produce offspring with. 

The two women can't be more different, as Clémentine is a fragile and even likeable delusional/psychotic mess who is desperare for help, a foil to Kelly-Anne in her cold and calculated manner and lifestyle and with her hideously unlikeable character traits. Nevertheless, Kelly-Anne for reasons still unknown invites Clémentine to her apartment to stay and the two bond as much as the unpalatable circumstances allow. Clémentine is impressed with Guenièvre, and laughs at Kelly-Anne's dark humor around remaking that she'd used to ask the AI as she was beta testing it whether she should commit suicide and it would reply "yes" until she trained it to value her person so that it now replies "no." It's mostly through the scenes with Clémentine that we viewers see Kelly-Anne's neurosis and her inability to socialize, though she has her warm moments. Unlike Clémentine, though, she doesn't romanticize Chevalier. At least not externally. Nevertheless, she religiously attends the trial every day with Clémentine until the day in which the videos of two of the victims are to be shown.

All except the jury, the lawyers and the accused, as well as the families of the victims, are asked by the judge to leave the courtroom. Clémentine is frustrated, wanting to see the footage for herself to prove that the masked man in the videos is indeed not Chevalier. Kelly-Anne with alarming confidence insists that the man's voice cannot be heard, implying she's seen the videos. Clémentine catches on and is shocked that Kelly-Anne has access to classified evidence. 

Here we learn that Kelly-Anne has already gained access through navigating the dark web to the videos and has never held doubt that Chevalier is the masked man and therefore guilty of the crimes he's on trial for. She's known the whole time what Chevalier has done. Kelly-Anne suggests Clémentine not see the videos but Clémentine insists. The poor girl suffers both from seeing the horrifying display of violence and witnessing that the man due to his stance and movements and a glimpse at his eyes through the mask is, indeed, her beloved Chevalier she wanted so badly to be innocent. Clémentine, despite having formed a kinship with Kelly-Anne, leaves Montréal, her last question to Kelly-Anne being, "what are you still doing here [implying the courthouse]?"

Without Clémentine, Kelly-Anne begins to spiral. Her career is compromised, and, in the meantime, we see her engaging in a chat with an anonymous seller on the dark web.

The creepiest, by far, and the most mysterious scene comes when Kelly-Anne steals a schoolgirl uniform from the school in which Chevalier's victims went, dons a blonde wig and carries fake braces, and goes to trial looking exactly like Camille. Even putting on blue contacts. While she's taken away from the courtroom by authorities is the only time Chevalier looks up at anyone throughout the entire film -- he looks up to her with sad-puppy eyes and waves while Kelly-Anne grins maniacally albeit triumphantly. She got his attention. She got the psychopath to react. 

 

Kelly-Anne loses her modeling contract due to that stunt which went public, and then decides to further engage with the anonymous dark web seller who's selling the third and final of Chevalier's videos. The one of Camille. Kelly-Anne's username being "Lady0fShalott" we begin to understand that she might not so much be a hybristophile as much as a psychopath/sociopath who is encased in her own tower like the Arthurian Lady of Shalott, in her apartment, weaving "webs" until she is ensnared by real-life. In the Arthurian legends the weaving Lady with a mirror is drawn to the actual person of Lancelot in the romantic sense, in the case of Kelly-Anne the model/IT genius/hacker is drawn by another psychopath/sociopath and leaves her "tower" for him. The Lady of Shalott leaving her tower means she will die, as per a curse. The weaving and the mirror are metaphors for the dark web and the AI.

Frenzied, Kelly-Anne vies to purchase the video. Jumping through hoops, during which she realizes that the police is watching her due to the courtroom stunt she pulled and also having hacked Guenièvre to spy on her, she wins enough money to purchase the Camille video.

This scene is the second most disturbing after the Camille-impersonation scene in the courtroom, as when Kelly-Anne "wins" having paid the equivalent of $410k, she is in full mania and laughing, thrilled that she holds the key to the case. 

Like the Lady of Shalott, she leaves her tower, having destroyed Guenièvre, and enters Camille's mother's house with the lock code she learned, to leave the footage. This footage is irrefutable proof that Chevalier is the culprit, as he wears no mask in this video. But, as she breaks into Camille's house, she's once again dressed as the young victim. Though she doesn't make a sound as everyone is sleeping, she still walks around as though she herself were Camille, before leaving the footage on the bedroom's nighstand and drifting away... supposedly to kill herself. Within her own heart there's irrefutable proof that she is cursed by her own psychopathy/sociopathy. She's up against the prospect of facing the authorities for having purchased such a thing as the snuff film. She's now a twisted criminal herself, without recourse to hide and browse the web anonymously. 

Kelly-Anne is the Lady of Shalott, and her desktop image is even of a painting of the legend.

Chevalier changes his plea to guilty and is handed life-imprisonment without parole.

The final scene shows Clémentine on the screen of one of Kelly-Anne's desktops, on a program in which she explains her delusional romantic obsession with the killer and her healing process from that, emphasizing that now her thoughts... are only with the victims and their families. Clémentine herself is somewhat a victim of a dangerous cultural obsession.

But given that we're to assume Kelly-Anne committed suicide, to what extent is she a victim? And, of what/whom? 

Camelot Meets "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Meets Pyramus & Thisbe

Canada falls under the British Crown, after all, so, it would stand to reason that several English myths and classics would serve as symbols.

During one scene in which we viewers glimpse into Kelly-Anne's world, we see a conversation on the screen between Kelly-Anne as "Lady0fShalott" with another person whose username is "dungeo," engaging in a back-and-forth of lines from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which in itself is a comedy of errors blending fantasy with reality. 

These lines are from the epilogue of Midsummer Night, in which the characters are putting on a play themselves (a play within a play) on the tragic story of star-crossed love from Ovid's "Metamorphosis" of Pyramus and Thisbe (this story inspired the plot of Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet"). The scene has to do with how the character of Moonshine speaks while not being the actual source of light, because the light of the moon is likened to a candle into which the cold dead moon would not merge with or else it burn. The moon wanes because it is at a distance from the candle, but, eventually, will get close enough to wax entirely. The character Moonshine thinks that all it shines on belongs to it, in the same way that the moon if it had self-awareness might think itself the source of light in ignorance that it only reflects the sun's light (while the sun may never be direcly gazed upon). For more on how moonlight has to do with megalomaniacal killers and the individuals who complement them for better or worse, please see my previous post moonlight and righteousness: death note and the killer egregore.

DEMETRIUS

He dares not come there for the candle; for, you

see, it is already in snuff.

HIPPOLYTA

I am aweary of this moon: would he would change!

THESEUS

It appears, by his small light of discretion, that

he is in the wane; but yet, in courtesy, in all

reason, we must stay the time.

LYSANDER

Proceed, Moon.

MOONSHINE

All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the

lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this

thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.

DEMETRIUS

Why, all these should be in the lanthorn; for all

these are in the moon. But, silence! here comes Thisbe.

Enter Thisbe

THISBE

This is old Ninny's tomb. Where is my love?

LION

[Roaring] Oh--

What matters just as much is the dialogue preceding these lines which don't feature in "Red Rooms:"

MOONSHINE

This lanthorn doth the horned moon present;--

DEMETRIUS

He should have worn the horns on his head.

THESEUS

He is no crescent, and his horns are

invisible within the circumference.

MOONSHINE

This lanthorn doth the horned moon present;

Myself the man i' the moon do seem to be.

THESEUS

This is the greatest error of all the rest: the man

should be put into the lanthorn. How is it else the

man i' the moon?

If the lantern is the digital world and Kelly-Anne the "man in the moon" it suggests that she should become one with the digital world entirely rather than exist outside it, and burn. As I said, she herself is a psychopathic criminal.

Also, the comment about how Moonshine (played by the character Starveling) should wear horns is a reference to the old image of a horned man being a cuckold or a man unaware that his wife is cheating while all else can clearly see, a naive and perhaps entitled man or just a plain fool. This squares with Guenièvre's witty joke-telling, particularly when Kelly-Anne is naive enough to think the police aren't on to her: "Why are ghosts such bad liars? ...Because they are so easy to see through."

The joke is on Kelly-Anne in the end, just like the joke's on the characters in Midsummer's Night, in Romeo & Juliet and in Pyramus & Thisbe. Therefore, we can say Kelly-Anne is victim to her hubris in thinking she could build her own world, her own artificial intelligence serving as a mirror, weave her way around the web, and not face the real world in which it's clear that her mind operates similar to that of a serial killer's.

Conclusion

I could speak about the madness of hybristophilia and the True Crime fandom, as well as on the psycho-spiritual implications of the digital world, but, I would rather you check out my short story available for $0.99 and see what I do with these very themes.

If not, then I offer up this book on Crime Library without analyzing it, by DeSales University professor of forensic psychology and criminal justice Katherine Ramsfeld, which covers a lot: Serial Killer Groupies.

Also, there are a lot of forums on which debates rage around whether "red rooms" do exist. This video, albeit creepy in nature, explains why they wouldn't exist.

REDRUM / MURDER -- STEPHEN KING'S SHINING