‘Red Rooms’ director Pascal Plante and star Juliette Gariépy on making the most disturbing film of the decade-OxBig News Network

There’s an unnerving stillness that seeps through Pascal Plante’s French-Canadian psychological thriller, rendering it unshakable. The camera lingers too long; the silence stretches uncomfortably; the dread metastasizes. Plante’s story of a fashion model, Kelly-Anne, consumed by her obsession with the murder trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a man accused of broadcasting snuff films on the dark web, is a study in both the magnetism and rot of true-crime fixation.

The titular ‘Red Rooms’, as whispered in the murkiest corners of internet lore, refer to alleged live-streamed torture and murder sessions hidden deep within the dark web — a place where the most depraved human impulses are said to unfold for an audience willing to pay in cryptocurrency. Though the existence of such rooms has never been conclusively proven, the myth persists, fueled by our collective fear of (and fascination with) the unseen horrors of the internet. Pascal’s Red Rooms taps into this morbid legend, dragging us into the same sickly voyeurism it seeks to critique.

A still from ‘Red Rooms’
| Photo Credit:
Instagram/ @chambresrouges

The filmmaker and his lead actress, Juliette Gariépy, sat down to unpack the monstrous heart of Red Rooms in conversation with The Hindu, touching upon the “sadistic” filmmaking processes, our culture’s disturbing attitude towards violence, and the psychic damage of consuming too much true-crime.

An exercise in sadism

Pascal is the first to admit that making the film felt “sadistic”. “I think if you want to make an anxiety-inducing film, the film has to feel unpredictable and dangerous,” he says. 

Red Rooms implicates all who share in its voyeurism and offers no easy comforts of detachment. Kelly-Anne witnesses unspeakable acts in search for the truth, and Plante’s direction forces us into her perspective. “The hardest part for me was the research and the writing,” Pascal admits. “I spoke to consultants who work in cybercriminality, people who see horrifying things daily. I didn’t have to look at anything directly, but the knowledge of what’s out there was extremely depressing.”

Building Kelly-Anne

Kelly-Anne is a cipher. We know she’s a model, a gambler, a hacker, but her interiority is a void. It’s Juliette’s almost alien physicality that makes her so fascinating. She’s methodical, controlled, and terrifyingly distant. So how does one prepare to play a character with no backstory?

The trick, it seems, is not to prepare at all. Pascal and Juliette agreed early on not to overindulge in Kelly-Anne’s psychology. “We didn’t really talk about her backstory,” Plante says. “I didn’t force anything on Juliette. It was all physical. The stillness — that was key. And stillness is a choice, you know? It’s really hard to do that while conveying emotion.”

A behind-the-scenes look at ‘Red Rooms’
| Photo Credit:
Instagram/ @chambresrouges

Gariépy welcomed the ambiguity. “I think there’s a tendency to over-explain characters,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, she had a troubled childhood’ or ‘Oh, she played too many video games as a kid.’ But real life doesn’t work like that. We don’t always trace our behavior back to a singular trauma. Sometimes you just wake up with the need to do something, to see something.”

In their limited preparation, Pascal did suggest some guiding touchstones. “We talked a bit about witchcraft,” he says. “There’s something about hacking that feels like modern witchery — mastering these hidden tools to manipulate the world. So I gave Juliette a few films, a few books, some music, but she was free to interpret them however she wanted.” 

Juliette also latched onto Kelly-Anne’s love for poker. “Poker’s all about control, about reading people, and that part of her made her almost not human or almost superhuman in that way,” she says. “It’s the same with squash — her playing a sport was a little moment of intimacy that we have access to, so I leaned into that obsessiveness, that addiction.” That craving for sensation, and for clarity seems to drive Kelly-Anne’s macabre fixations.

What does hell sound like?

The film’s sound design feels like it’s pried from the depths of hell. Its most harrowing sequences are built entirely through some incredible aural pieces. Blood splattering, a driller humming, a child’s petrifying screams — it’s the stuff of nightmares.

With a background in sound design, Pascal approached this element with a near-masochistic precision. During the offline editing phase, he initially stitched together audio from horror films like Hostel to shape the horrifying soundscape. But for the final sound, Pascal and his team opted to use actual teenager voice actors, aged 13 and 14, for the film’s most gut-wrenching moments. 

A still from ‘Red Rooms’
| Photo Credit:
Instagram/ @chambresrouges

“Believe it or not, I’m really not sadistic in real life, and so doing this was terrifying for me,” he chuckles. The young actors, however, loved it — screaming into the microphones and walking away with smiles. “I was relieved,” Pascal recalls. “I really did not want the film to be traumatic for the people involved in it.” Still, he postponed the recording sessions for as long as possible, dreading the day he would have to materialise those horrific sounds.

ALSO READ:Of Monsters and Supermen: Tracing the roots of TV’s most diabolical villains 

Where practical gore effects often expose their own artificiality, sound has a different kind of impact — it lodges itself in the subconscious. “If I were to see a gory image, my brain switches into ‘how is it made?’” Plante explains. “I guess the film is an ode to the power of sound. Even when we don’t see anything, it is freaking horrifying.”

The ethics of true crime

Red Rooms exists in a cultural moment saturated with true crime consumption. Streaming platforms churn out docuseries about serial killers with an apathetic regularity. Social media sleuths treat real-life murders as puzzles to be solved. So what happens when society loses its ability to feel the horrors of real violence?

Red Rooms arrives at a cultural moment saturated with true crime. Streaming platforms churn out serial killer docuseries with the apathetic regularity of an assembly line, while social media sleuths pick apart real-life murders like puzzles in the Sunday paper. The line between morbid curiosity and callous indifference grows thinner by the day — so what happens when we’ve watched so much horror that we forget how to feel it?

Juliette reflected on how society’s obsession with serial killers and their “genius minds” often serves as a perverse reassurance — as if recognising oneself as merely a flawed friend, rather than a murderer, provides a strange kind of moral comfort. “Maybe it’s because it reassures us that we’re good people because there’s so many worse people out there,” she says.

ALSO READ: Hollywood horror gives up theatrics to accommodate the terrors of the womb

Pascal expanded on this, framing it as a dangerous trade-off. “Evil is like the lack of empathy,” he notes. “We easily trade our empathy for entertainment, and we have to make conscious efforts to bring our humanity back.” 

“We witness so much horror daily that if I were to fully switch on my hypersensitivity and empathy, I would break down and cry. The stimuli have become so constant, so loud, and so pervasive that you almost have to shut it off just to survive — just to function,” Pascal says. “It becomes an effort to turn that empathy back on, to reconnect with your own humanity. I think this even reflects in what we consume, why we consume it, and how we engage with the world around us.”

Red Rooms is set to debut at the Red Lorry Film Festival from March 21 to 23, in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Passes for the festival are available on BookMyShow.