10 Recent Horror Films You Need To Stop Sleeping On

Red Rooms is only Quebecois director Pascal Plante’s third feature film, but it has the sure hand of a more experienced director, unpacking a modern world of anonymous, digital violence across two nail-biting hours.

We follow model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) to the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man accused of live-streaming the torture and murder of three blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenage girls in a so-called "red room". From the outset it’s unclear why Kelly-Anne harbours this obsession with a serial killer, or why she uses her nefarious tech skills to stalk one of the girls’ family - the only girl whose torture-murder video has not been recovered by the police.

While the film is crime before it is horror, prioritising its courtroom elements over the dark images that bring the families, lawyers and jurors together, it is built around a deep well of horrific images and ideas. And Plante drip-feeds these to us in glimpses of the red rooms, detailed descriptions of the violence pursued against the girls, and of course the agonising (and sometimes impassive) reactions of those viewing the videos.

A 2020s response to Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover, Red Rooms makes pointed use of the kind of nefarious technology and corrupted digital mindset that has been festering at the heart of the internet and society for decades now, putting it to devastating use. Pity, then, that the film took only $150k at the box office.