‘Hacking is modern witchcraft’: Pascal Plante on ‘Red Rooms’

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. 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: 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.