Lounge
‘Hacking is modern witchcraft’: Pascal Plante on ‘Red Rooms’
Summary
Pascal Plante’s eerie thriller questions the morality of true crime fandom and the emptiness of our digital lives
Red Rooms begins in court, with accused Montreal serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) on trial for the murder of three teenage girls, but writer-director Pascal Plante gradually reveals a deeper interest in investigating the widespread ethical rot that accompanies society’s morbid fascination with this case. He not only digs into the dehumanising nature of true crime but also the psychological extreme of parasocial relationships, in which “serial killer groupie" Clementine (Laurie Babin) builds up Ludovic in her head, granting him a humanity he doesn’t possess.
The French-language thriller, playing at the Red Lorry Film Festival in Mumbai this weekend, paints a grim picture of human life as up for consumption, as model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) fixates on the case, sleeping outside the courtroom like one would camp out before a big concert and trawling the dark web for Ludovic’s “red rooms"—virtual spaces in which users can pay to watch footage of the girls being killed. Plante spoke to Lounge about his hard-to-shake horror film. Edited excerpts from the interview:
What is your relationship to true crime like? Did making this movie affect the way you saw the genre?
I wasn’t early on the bandwagon of watching these shows, but time really stretched during covid and so I fell into bingeing them mindlessly. It’s a complex relationship—you can’t look away and yet it’s not fulfilling. I thought: why am I spending so much time in the company of evil men? There were too many of these shows by 2021, when I started writing Red Rooms. It was unethical and exploitative of the folklore surrounding the victims, without thinking of the victims themselves. So I grew more critical of it. Juliette Gariépy, who plays Kelly-Anne, used to listen to true-crime podcasts and now doesn’t really want to.
Was this why you decided not to depict physical violence in the film? There’s a focus on psychological and emotional violence instead.
If I see a violent image while watching a film, I either push it away or, since I’m a filmmaker, I try to figure out how it’s been done. It’s not as scary then, because you’re looking for the tricks and you’re like: Oh, nice prosthetics, nice fake blood. When you begin decoding an image, it feels fake. You don’t experience it with empathy the way you should when such things occur in real life. I didn’t want to show the video of the red room murders because I thought focusing on Clementine’s reaction to them was more interesting from a narrative standpoint.
Sound is such a powerful tool, which is what makes that scene terrifying. Our sound design included voice acting, people screaming, a drill whirring, blood spurting, and when you mash all those together, these “tricks" are hard to see individually. You can’t “decode" them the way you would an image. If you did want to see the video, that says a lot about you. You’re then confronted with your own desires, your own bloodthirst.
What struck me about ‘Red Rooms’ was how much of people’s lives are on display online—in horrific, degrading conditions like the red rooms, but also through our own social media posts that inadvertently make us vulnerable.
The film wouldn’t work if we didn’t want to follow Kelly-Anne, even though there’s something dangerous about her. That got us talking, and we got to the topic of witchcraft. Hacking is modern witchcraft—the tools are so powerful and easily accessible, and if you’re tech-savvy, that gives you superpowers.
The film is expressionistic, but I wanted my depictions of the internet to be accurate. Screens are tedious to film and hard to make intelligible while writing. Hacking in movies is like a magic wand of gibberish. I did a lot of research into hacking, and I loved the social engineering part of it, in which you try to use someone’s vulnerability to your advantage.
The hacking in Red Rooms had to make narrative sense. It’s so simple and step-by-step that it becomes scary. Just as a killer who looks like your neighbour is more frightening than someone who looks like a monster.
We so willingly give up our privacy for convenience. My passwords have been hacked a few times. I still don’t have a tape on my webcam, even after making this film.
It’s also a chilling portrait of life in the digital age, which grants you anonymity but also reinforces isolation. The only one telling Kelly-Anne jokes is her home device.
This isn’t a “covid film", but it was conceived during that time. I was overdosing on screens and digital content, and also isolated. A Zoom conversation is a poor replacement for a natural encounter with someone. Loneliness is Kelly-Anne’s Achilles’ heel. So she interacts with the robotic voice of her home device, and then attempts a human bond. I wanted her to be on the tipping point of: I like my life as it is, but there’s something missing. Humanity, interaction. This is not a techno-phobic film, but the thesis of the film, if there is one, is that technology is a poor substitute for human contact.
Gayle Sequeira is a Mumbai-based film critic.
