Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where it won the best film, screenplay, and performance awards. But it didn’t exactly take the world by storm, as some of its thematic predecessors had; where Olivier Assayas, in 2002, had boldly prophesized with Demonlover a hellish vision of the cyberspace, this cyberspace has, 20 years on, become a fact and way of life. And yet its thrills are sought, now more than ever, with incursions into forbidden territory by all walks of life: creepypasta forums and gore channels serve as fodder for morbid curiosity, while the urban legends they inspire engage directly with the macabre.
In taking as its subject the arguably ultimate online urban legend — a place where real bodies are bought, sold, and killed for the pleasure of virtual, paying spectators — while refusing to present its space and sordid details directly, Red Rooms appears to adopt a detached, almost academic position in its critique of the violent psyche. But this is misleading, because Plante seeks in precisely this detachment a recognition of our inured sensibilities, as consumers and spectators of entertainment and media, against violence. To revel in the minds of killer and victim would merely fetishize this violence; to reduce violence to social procedural would avoid acknowledging its everyday impulses altogether.
In Review Online previously reviewed Red Rooms as part of our Fantasia 2023 coverage, and on the occasion of the film’s U.S. theatrical release, I had the pleasure of speaking with Plante over Zoom.
Morris Yang: Something that struck me about Red Rooms is this: on one hand, it’s a film that explores very taboo territory, but at the same time it tries to frame it in an intellectual way; that is, it intellectualizes the process by which people explore the taboo. So it isn’t a film that tries to shock by virtue of its shock value alone, but rather by penetrating the psychologies of characters and audiences alike. What inspired you to make this film, and are there any contemporary filmmakers or films from which you drew inspiration?
Pascal Plante: That’s very true — the idea for Red Rooms was not to shock for the sake of shock value. I watch many, many films, and while I’m drawn to genre films, I’m usually drawn more to the atmospheric and psychological side of things. I mean, I could enjoy a very exploitative, gory horror film once in a while, but that’s really not what I was going for with my film. So if the film ends up being shocking, I think it’s a testimony of us trying to create something that is relatable, that the psychological consequences of the violence are relatable. And once you see things this way, a lot of films can be very extremely disturbing, because violence is usually depicted in movies — in narrative fiction — in an entertaining way, or in a way where you don’t necessarily value lives on screen. Like you know that everything you see is fiction, so you might actually enjoy seeing somebody die onscreen, whereas in real life I don’t think anyone would enjoy that at all. I was trying to understand that logic: why is it that in entertainment we seek we get this kind of bloodthirst, and why do we crave that for entertainment, why is this even entertaining? So I tried to make a non-entertaining film about it, that actually confronts you with the horror that it depicts. You mentioned “intellectual” and that’s quite correct — I don’t shy away from it.
As for the filmmakers that have inspired me, there’s one that rules above the others for this film in particular: Michael Haneke. When Haneke does a genre film, he doesn’t do it in an exploitative manner, but rather he lures the audience and then plays with their needs and wants. He’s very aware of how people react to all the stimuli he creates, and he plays you like a violin. I think he’s a master at getting into your head, constructing a labyrinthine narrative that’s organized very meticulously and yet allowing you to be self-reflexive about your experience watching the film. What drove me to make this film is perhaps similar: the idea of having a protagonist who is in some sense a satellite to the murderer felt interesting to me. There are many films out there which tend to focus on either the investigation of such a case — all these police stories — or the killers themselves, films that are portraits of such killers. But there’s more to it than investigations and portraits; it’s a microcosm in its own right. Red Rooms was written during the pandemic, and true crime was basically the zeitgeist then; everybody was binge-watching this and that trial, it seemed to be in the air. It felt like a widespread obsession that we needed to talk about. And by having access to so many screens during the pandemic, voluntarily or otherwise, I felt I myself was becoming less empathetic. It’s almost like behind the screen and the keyboard, my brain got mushy, nothing felt as real or as tangible. This climate of unreality created Red Rooms, in a way.
MY: I definitely see the parallels with Haneke, and though I’ve not seen Funny Games — a travesty, I know — I’ve heard about how ruthlessly effective that film is in getting under your skin.
PP: Exactly — getting under your skin is a great analogy. I think [Funny Games] is a super hard film to watch: there’s only one moment of graphic violence, and it’s almost cartoonish, almost meant for a laugh, and then [Haneke] plays some tricks on you. I’m not going to reveal too much, but what is crazy about it is that while the violence is usually offscreen, the characters are unusually relatable. You know how sometimes in horror films we laugh at the characters for being dumb and think, of course we wouldn’t react the way they do? But in Funny Games pretty much any sane person would react to the violence in the same way the characters do, and it just goes to show that if films depict violence in a realistic and relatable way, most films would be horrible, most would be unbearable, and Funny Games is almost unbearable.
MY: It’s interesting how such works subvert the enjoyment people get when they watch most violent films. Maybe in a way it’s because those films are meant to be watched passively, since we assume that the characters onscreen are meant to die for your viewing pleasure. But what I noticed in your film is more akin to this dual notion of spectatorship and surveillance, which strike me as two sides of the same coin. On one hand, red rooms imply spectators, but because of their inherently libertarian logic — those offering more money sit at the table; those who don’t are the menu — there’s an anonymity to its proceedings that turns the camera back onto us: are voyeurs like Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) also, in a sense, exhibitionists insofar as the thrill they get stems partly from a sense of transgressing into the taboo and risking capture?
PP: Well, Kelly-Anne doesn’t wholly embody the taboo fandom, or groupies, if we can call them that. I don’t want to make a case where she’s emblematic of all of them, because she’s such a singular character. If you look at the profiles of most serial killer obsessives, or even those of people who tend to gravitate toward the taboo, they’re actually quite varied, and that’s actually how the character of Clémentine (Laurie Babin) was born: as a necessary counterpoint to Kelly-Anne. Otherwise, Kelly-Anne might’ve become an intellectual shortcut; my thesis isn’t that she’s all of the obsessed people combined, but she’s definitely on the extreme side of things, which might be linked to some kind of exhibitionism, but also, on the other hand, to the adrenaline-seeking. She’s someone who sees so much, and is as a result quite blasé in the face of it all. Extreme content’s a hard drug, she needs more and more of it, and everything she does could be said to follow this adrenaline-fueled and sociopathic template, down to the hobbies she has. Especially gambling, since it’s a way to feed this adrenaline.
But Kelly-Anne is also something else in the film — she’s almost a ghost. She embodies this ghost-like presence, though not initially when we see her rooted in reality, in research (and I did lots of research on the profile of taboo obsessives like her myself). But at one point my research ended and the fictional character started: the film opens with her waking from what feels like a thousand-year sleep, and she haunts the film throughout, appearing and disappearing at random. And for me, as a filmmaker, this is where the fun begins, because this is such a dark topic to research that at one point my imagination almost needed to come to the forefront. To be completely honest, it’s a way to protect myself. But yeah, the fun — if I can use such a word here — was also in creating this expressionistic experience, this character who’s a bit otherworldly, in creating a world that isn’t quite real. It’s fun, also, when movies remind you that they’re movies, that you can be playful with the language of cinema, the sound, the music, the rhythm, the flow, all of that.
MY: I think I really liked your film precisely because of its expressionism; it’s not just a conventional realist drama about an investigation. It reminded me a lot of Bertrand Bonello’s Coma, which was also shot during the pandemic and also centered around the experience of mental and online isolation. It’s almost uncanny: both films are set in Canada, and both were released one year apart. I’m starting to think there’s something in the air.
PP: You’re probably right. Something in the air, something in the culture — you know, as artists, we’re like sponges, and I think that people tend to be inspired by the same things without knowing it. I’ve been watching a lot of true crime during the pandemic, and just last year there was [Justine Triet’s] Anatomy of a Fall, so many courtroom dramas, Francophone ones too, I don’t know why. And everyone’s getting the same idea — I might even go as far as to say that nothing is truly original. My creative drive doesn’t come from a film that I see and want to replicate, because it doesn’t make sense; if a film already exists, why replicate what it does? That’s Hollywood maybe, but for artists I think it’s the opposite — you see so many things that look alike, and then you start shaping the film that you want that you haven’t seen, the point of view that feels fresh. So we’ve seen so many courtroom dramas, so many films about isolation and the terminally online — I haven’t seen Coma, but I’m going to watch it for sure — but they all stem from the same problem: we try to grasp something that’s in the air, that’s intangible, that’s of our time, and we try to distill that in a work of fiction. And that’s why films sometimes look alike: they come out, they have the same topic, the same obsessions, and nobody’s talked to each other explicitly, that’s just how it is.
MY: My experience is quite similar, even though I’m not an artist. Around 10 years ago, when I was still in middle school, there used to be a website called LiveLeak and it was very popular because of the uncensored content it shared, typically of human deaths and other gruesome subjects. At the height of the Islamic State regime, LiveLeak also hosted plenty of videos featuring beheadings and tortures. Now it’s been shuttered, but I doubt that the market for such content has gone anywhere, both demand and supply; if anything, it’s become more decentralized and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Perhaps more so than your film implies? After all, it’s only Kelly-Anne that seems to have the power to penetrate this side of the web.
PP: I think the word “power” is very revealing: I would even say that in the modern world being a bit sociopathic and being able to switch off your sense of empathy can almost be seen as a superpower. Of course, that’s not how I want to live my life necessarily, but if you have that kind of mindset you can do just about anything, especially with computers. The computer is an extraordinarily powerful tool, and if you know how to hack it — yes, Kelly-Anne is a hacker [in a literal sense], but she’s also someone who finds the “life-hacks,” as it were, in anything. She’s driven by efficiency, and to me she almost embodies capitalism in its pursuit of sheer productivity. I would even say that I don’t think you can become a billionaire without being a bit of a sociopath; you almost need to stomp on someone else or be willing to steal, go the extra mile, you know what I mean? She’s an antihero, but she’s also someone fascinating to watch. That’s literally the gamble of the film; the film would fall flat and crumble if you’re not at least intrigued by her. You have to look at her the way she looks at the killer: we sense the red flags, but we can’t look away.
MY: That’s definitely how I felt about Kelly-Anne as well. She’s highly rational, highly methodical, possibly sociopathic, and one gets the sense that her hobbies — e.g., searching for the red rooms, her fetish modeling — serve as substitutes for an emotional outlet. Whereas, in contrast, a character like Clémentine seems to be defined by her more straightforwardly empathetic disposition. But both characters have a morbid fascination with the taboo: what exactly about the taboo, in your view, sparks so much intrigue? Is it mainly its proliferation and ease of access that desensitizes viewers, or is desensitization a larger consequence of life in modern society?
PP: That’s quite a complex question. I think there’s something innate in humans — going back to Ancient Rome, people entertained themselves by watching condemned men get eaten by wild beasts or die in gladiator fights — that speaks to this violent impulse. But not only this; I think that, on a biological level, it’s something instinctive. In a bar fight, people will look, there’s almost a need to recognize danger in order to avoid it. And to add another layer to this equation: why is it almost always the men who kill, and why is it almost always the women who are attracted to men that kill? That certainly feels super counter-intuitive: why would you gravitate towards those who might be harmful to you? It’s almost like the sheep are obsessed with the wolf… I can’t answer this too rigorously, but you know how this “bad boy” image is quite popular in our culture, how we sometimes are attracted to these personalities? Let’s say that the serial killer is the ultimate bad boy — in his case, I think it’s the power that underscores this attraction, this idea of power of life and death over other human beings. And I also think that the nature of our society has a role to play in this: society does not empower women as much as men, and there’s this idea that women might want to gravitate toward power as a result, even though it sounds really twisted. But that’s just one way to think about it, I suppose; it’s certainly very complex.
MY: Earlier you mentioned being able to switch off the sense of empathy as potentially a kind of modern “superpower.” By sheer coincidence, I was reading Paul Bloom’s essay just today, titled “Against Empathy,” and its broad idea was that empathy has limitations because too much empathy may lead one to fall short morally. I’m wondering if there’s not a kind of perverse empathy inherent in the fascination that Kelly-Anne and others have for the snuff videos. Perhaps more controversially, could we also say that killers and psychopaths have to empathize — though not in a traditional fashion! — with their victims because it’s only through this empathy that they register the latter’s suffering most? Are we then all of us serial empaths, as users of the Internet — with all its inroads and outlets of graphic violence and shock content, clickbait and ragebait?
PP: I’d say that Red Rooms was all about depicting how the media depicted violence, because it’s linked to the question about why we’re even obsessed in the first place. And something that was quite quickly apparent during my research was that this obsession isn’t necessarily linked to physical beauty. You know, for example, that Charles Manson — especially toward the end of his life — wasn’t beautiful by any means, but he was still the most “popular” serial killer. Why? Because he’s the ultimate myth. He’s been mythologized for years, decades even, by the media. At the same time I think each of us has a defense mechanism against these myths; we are bombarded by these images to an aggressive level, and if we were to switch on our empathy to a hundred percent, I don’t think I’d be able to watch even two minutes of the news without breaking down. Digitization may have sharpened this defense mechanism and made it more acute, and we switch off our empathy as a result, but I think a good film can prod you to switch it back on in large part by providing context. Most times on the Internet you don’t have this context, so you have to tune [the images] out necessarily to be functional. I think that Red Rooms is interesting because it subverts psychological expectations. For example, Clémentine, who’s a bit annoying, wins you over because at least she’s truthful to her feelings and emotions. Even the mother [of one of the victims], with whom we would undoubtedly be allied in real life, is also a bit of an antagonist in the film, because Kelly-Anne is the vehicle for the film and so we empathize, oddly enough, with her. So as a result, everyone who agrees with her becomes an antagonist. But for me that’s a very interesting tool to play with, because then I can fuck you up by making you cheer for Kelly-Anne, the same woman who wants to acquire the snuff video of a 13-year-old girl. It’s twisted — why would we want her to succeed? — but film logic makes you empathize and root for sometimes counterintuitive things. In real life, I really don’t think most people would want to root for her.
MY: There has been increasing worry that films with such subject matter may not only condone, but also glorify violence, and I think this does speak to the current debate about censorship, especially online. The concern here is that censoring taboo subject matter doesn’t really address the issue of the threats themselves, and may only be a front for quelling freedom of expression while allowing these threats to continue to proliferate out of the public eye. How do you see this issue?
PP: I think it’s the same as the debate about drug legalization, for example. So many people argue that these bans are arbitrary — at some point we as a society decided that alcohol was okay, but weed was not — and they are, because if you were to look at it from the perspective of harm, many legal things are harmful, and vice versa. There’s something very banal about these proceedings, and I think the same goes for the killer in Red Rooms, and that’s what makes it scary: he gives the people what they want, and it’s very banal, almost mind-numbing the way he’s found success in his business; there’s both a supply of victims and a demand for them. And this is what scares me when I watch movies; it’s not so much the monster movies, but the ones rooted in reality, the ones that are so banal. Maybe that’s why these days there’s a trend in cult films, about these things that are hidden, that you kind of know are there, and I think it’s good material to play with as a screenwriter and filmmaker.
On the topic of censorship, there’s so many things that are only accessible illegally online, through the Tor network, for instance. I myself am not condemning the Tor network as a whole — and I hope this comes across clearly — because I think we can all pretty much agree that having a tool which prevents third-party spying is not inherently a bad thing. But just going back to the freaking human soul, the darkness of this soul — if you see the Tor network as the remote Wild West of the Internet, it parallels how people react in a lawless environment. And again, I think this is what’s truly scary to me, the darkness of the human soul coming to the forefront.
MY: Now that you’ve made this film — your third feature, after Fake Tattoos and Nadia, Butterfly — do you have any plans for another film, one that’s possibly less overwhelming?
PP: Every film that I’ve done so far is very, very different, and I don’t see myself diving back into a particular topic. I think in the indie scene, unlike Hollywood, when you do something that’s lower-scale and do it well, people start to say that “you’re good at this” and that “you should do this again, and again, and again.” And I don’t know… other people may want you to milk that cow, but I’m writing my screenplays and I don’t have a monomania — I’m not just obsessed about this, I’m obsessed about many things. When I read the news, there’s so many stories everywhere, so all my films so far have been extremely different. I have two films at the screenwriting stage: one is at a more advanced stage than the other, but one of them is about a pop star and the other is a period film. So, very different. [laughs] But there are things that obsess me that come through in all my films. Some people watch, let’s say, Red Rooms, and then they go back to watch Nadia, Butterfly, and they say “oh look, I see there are some things that both films, even if they look very distinct, have in common” — and yes, I think they do. My real obsessions are going to be peppered in each film, but the topics, the research I do, will be very different.
MY: It’s like how some filmmakers are said to “make the same film over and over again.”
PP: Yeah, but some people make it more obvious than others. [laughs] Like how many zombie movies can [George A.] Romero make? But, you know, you have [Yasujirō] Ozu on one hand literally doing variations of the same theme very rigorously, and then you have [Stanley] Kubrick — not like I’m comparing myself to any of these masters — who makes vastly different movies every time, in tone, in style, in genre. And yet you can always tell it’s a Kubrick film. To me, that’s also the sign of a great master, someone who does what he does with integrity, who keeps following his intuitions, his obsessions. I’m in awe of [Kubrick’s] filmography: it’s coherent, and yet so vast and different and vibrant and exciting.
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