How the Cyber-Thriller ‘Red Rooms’ Became a Cult Classic Before It Was Ever Released
No matter how hard movies like Hackers, Blackhat, and Unfriended may work to convince you otherwise, there’s nothing especially cinematic about using the internet. As immersive and time-consuming as “being online” can be, when you zoom out, it’s mostly just people with bad posture hunched over computer terminals, clicking and clacking.
Of course, exceptional films have extracted considerable drama from this tedium. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, in the final scene of The Social Network, stewing impatiently as he waits for an ex-girlfriend to accept his friend request on the platform he founded, is a good example. So-called “desktop films” like Searching, which unfold entirely on computer and smartphone screens, approximate something of how information is actually communicated online. But few recent films have tapped into the psychology (and the dark heart) of terminally online culture like Red Rooms. Want proof? The film is already an underground cult hit—before its even hit US theaters.
The film stars Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, a Quebecois fashion model who moonlights as an online poker stud and internet snoop obsessed by the trial of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). He’s on trial for murdering several teenage girls and broadcasting their grisly deaths and dismemberments in so-called “red rooms” on the dark web. Kelly-Anne sleeps on the courthouse steps in order to get a good seat for the proceedings every morning. She’s joined by another “groupie,” Clémentine (Laura Babin), whose interest in Chevalier is more clearly sycophantic.
Red Rooms director Pascal Plante was inspired in part by the real-life case of Luka Magnotta, a Canadian killer who broadcast the murder of a young student online and who was subsequently tracked down with the help of amateur internet sleuths. (The Magnotta case, and the crowd-sourced manhunt for him, was the subject of the popular 2019 true crime series Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer).
But for Plante, the serial killer setup is little more than a MacGuffin, one that opens up into a more sophisticated, finely sketched study. Not of a serial killer, but of the fans and groupies that crop up around them. “The platforms have been milking that true-crime cow like crazy,” Plante explains from his home in Montreal. “I’d watch a six-hour documentary about Ted Bundy, and there’d be a few shots of his fans. I wanted a movie about them.”
There’s a term for this kind of person, who lusts after such violent figures. They’re called hybristophilics. Bonnie Parker, the Depression-era public enemy, is a classic case. (Indeed, hybristophilia is sometimes called Bonnie and Clyde syndrome.) It’s reported that Charles Manson received up to 60,000 fan letters a year until his death in 2017. Wade a little deeper into the internet and you’ll find fandoms emerging around everyone from Unabomber Ted Kaczynski to the Columbine shooters.
Where Red Rooms’ Clémentine rather neatly fits the profile of the wide-eyed serial killer groupie—constantly rhapsodizing about the accused’s innocence and the witch hunt waged against him—Kelly-Anne’s own motivations are murkier. She flatly, unfeelingly watches videos of the murders. She devotes every late, sleepless hour outside of the courthouse to scouring the deep web for another murder video, which will either incriminate or exonerate the alleged killer. Until the film’s very last, gripping moments, it’s unclear which of these two outcomes she’d prefer.
“The viewer needs to look at Kelly-Anne the way Kelly-Anne looks at the killer,” Plante explains. “There’s danger lurking in her. Should we root for her? Should we not root for her?”
It’s a complex, and truly creepy, characterization brought to life by Gariépy’s equally chilly, cipher-ish performance. And, in a case of life (or at least the internet) imitating art, both the character and the film have found admirers online, who discuss their theories about Kelly-Anne’s motivation, post Red Rooms memes, and pass around pirated copies of the finished film.
Rue Lumbroso, who is 29 and lives in London, first caught Red Rooms at a local film festival. She was enamored on sight. The film faithfully captured the experience of being extremely online, what Lumbroso calls “the psychic texture” of it. “I grew up on the internet,” she explains, “and when you’re someone who spent your entire childhood online, and most of your adulthood, you can really clock it right away.”
Lumbroso’s favorite movie is David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the antisocial hacker heroine of which is an obvious touchstone for Red Rooms’ Kelly-Anne. Yet Lumbroso also had a more personal connection to Red Rooms’ complicated, slippery antagonist. “I’m a trans woman, and a lot of other trans women I know really love it,” she says. “I think it can be fun to root for a woman like Kelly-Anne, who pushes the ideas of what is respectable and what is a complicated, dark female character.”
A self-professed “huge movie rewatcher,” Lumbroso wanted to see Red Rooms again as soon as the credits rolled. But, outside of those one-off festival screenings, the film wasn’t available. Not on streaming, not anywhere. Soon, she saw screenshots circulating online and realized the film had to be available in some form. She turned to private BitTorrent clients, where fans and collectors share digital rips of movies, on the sly. “Torrents are the way I watch most things,” she says. “Maybe one day I’ll be rich. But for now, I can’t feed my appetite for movies just by going to the cinema. And they don’t even have all the movies I want to see. So I always have to download.”
Digital piracy often gets a bad rap. Maybe it’s memories of those old “You wouldn’t steal a car” pre-roll ads that were a fixture in theaters. Maybe it’s the word “piracy.” But recent research suggests that uploading, downloading, and swapping movies illegally isn’t necessarily an impediment to a given title’s bottom line. One study found that word of mouth generated by illegal sharing of movies can actually increase box-office revenues. And for cinephiles who may be cut off (either financially or geographically) for the indie or art-house cinemas, piracy can prove essential—or at least a necessary evil. As Andy Chatterley, CEO of research firm Muso, told WIRED earlier this year, “The thing about piracy is, it’s really just people wanting to consume content. They’re not doing it for the act of piracy; they’re being driven by marketing on other things that drive legal consumption.”
Smaller films like Red Rooms often find audiences in such less-than-legal circles. Lucas Tavares, 23, lives in a small town in Brazil. He obsessively follows film coverage on social media platforms like X and Letterboxd. Red Rooms first came to his attention over a year ago, when it premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. A few weeks later, he was able to scrounge a copy online. “Where I live,” he says, “it’s very hard to see smaller movies, and independent movies, especially if they are not American blockbusters. So I rely on torrents a lot.”
For Henry Meeks, a 29-year old school teacher in Philadelphia, torrents and online piracy channels became essential during the Covid-19 lockdowns. With cinemas shuttered and film production all but halted, many cinephiles took the opportunity to dig deeper into older, harder-to-find films. “What I love about piracy,” Meeks says, “is that there’s tons of movies that have fallen out of distribution. There’s no Blu-ray. So it’s a really good archival practice. Stuff that I really can’t find anywhere, even if I wanted to buy it, is kept alive on those websites.”
When Meeks heard some buzz about Red Rooms, he downloaded it and immediately shared it with friends on Plex: the freeware streaming-media service that allows users to amass and share collections of private media. This curation distinguishes private servers like Plex from the bigger, aboveground streaming services with their algorithmic recommendation systems. “Netflix and Amazon Prime have more movies than you could ever see,” Meeks says. “But it’s not really curated by a human.”
Plante seems a little ambivalent about his movie’s success online. While he is embracing his movie leaking, he notes that building this sort of word of mouth was very much “not a strategy.” He says the film’s French-Canadian distributor insisted on dropping Red Rooms’ on Canadian video-on-demand services shortly after its theatrical premiere. “I told him that the day after it’s on iTunes in Canada, it’s going to be on freaking PirateBay,” he says, referring to the popular BitTorrent client.
Of course, not everyone has the ability, or inclination, to download MP4 or AVI files of relatively obscure French-Canadian cyber-thrillers. Plante is confident the film’s upcoming wide release in US cinemas, on September 6, will help expand his movie’s niche, cultish appeal. Smaller movies like this tend to have a long life, moving through the international film festival circuit to bigger bookings in cinemas and to home video. Gray-web peer-to-peer file-sharing websites are just one place people can find the film.
Still, Plante finds it totally appropriate that his movie about the internet’s underbelly has found an audience among people who wade in those same waters.“It’s a very online, very geeky film,” he says. “Of course people are going to torrent it.”
