News

If, by and large, American cinema has taken a puritanical view on sex, leave it to our neighbors up north to craft a refreshingly frank, hilarious comedy of manners about seeking erotic pleasure when life has hit a dead end. Scripted by Catherine Léger from her own stage play Home Deliveries, itself inspired by Claude Fournier’s 1970 feature Two Women in Gold, Canadian director Chloé Robichaud’s Two Women is playful, raucous, and wholly heartfelt, a film not afraid to explore the dark corners of life when it comes to depression, infidelity, and the dullness that can set in during new motherhood. Its comedy-first approach comes with a comforting sense of tenderness and fleetness, shot on 35mm with a lively warmth by cinematographer Sara Mishara.

Living next to each other in their Quebec apartment complex, the two women, Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf), have hit a sense of...

What is it with 30-something Quebecoise filmmakers and their interest in exploring the tired porn trope of unsatisfied wives finding their sexual needs met by hot handymen? In 2023, Monia Chokri’s Ok dramedy “The Nature of Love” was selected for Cannes and even won a César for best foreign film. Now, helmer Chloé Robichaud (“Sara Prefers to Run”) enters the Sundance World Dramatic competition with “Two Women,” a cringy, unconvincing remake of a cult 1970 Québec sex romp, “Deux femmes en or.”

Screenwriter-producer Catherine Léger earlier adapted the material into a successful stageplay, but the theater version seems to have included some bracing irony, a quality sorely missing from this earnest, naturalistic misfire. The best that can be said for Robichaud’s film is that her two leads, Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf, give committed performances

The action mostly takes place in an ugly, suburban Montreal eco-housing coop, where the cramped interior spaces scream confinement.

The horror genre may not be everyone's cup of tea in a world that feels more like an installment of The Purge franchise every day — but for those who find catharsis in replacing their real-life fears with fictional ones, a recent Canadian-French release might just fit the bill. Red Roomsis a high-stakes psychological thriller released with a nearly perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes — and it just became available to stream on Shudder.

At first glance, the plot of Red Rooms seems evocative of an episode of Criminal Minds: there's court drama, a twisted serial killer, and even a whodunnit mystery to boot. At the heart of Red Rooms, however, is a woman whose fascination with the grotesque leads her to make more and more morally dubious choices, transforming her from the protagonist of the story to something a little more ambiguous. Kelly-Anne is a wealthy supermodel with a side...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

2024 saw the flicker of a major flame in the strands of cinema that have my heart the most.

It was a year where sex, romance, and representation were back on the menu in exciting new configurations, mirrored behind the camera and in front of the screen. Films that made us feel, self-reflect, introspect, change our minds, and realize. In a sociopolitical climate increasingly intent on sidelining and disavowing empathy at every turn, it’s comforting to know that we are not immune to movies.

Favorite Big Screen Rediscoveries: Zerophilia, Moving, Bumpkin Soup, Manji, Their Last Love Affair

Honorable Mentions: Caught by the Tides, Summer Solstice, Gift, Ghost Cat Anzu, You Burn Me

10. Happyend (Neo Sora)

In 2024, Japanese cinema began to travel and shift in new ways. The...

When you purchase through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

If you are a horror fan then there is a big chance that you might have heard about the horror streaming service Shudder, and if you have its subscription you might be wondering what’s in store for you in January 2025. Don’t worry there is a host of new and old horror movies coming to the service in the upcoming month and we have listed the 10 best movies coming to Shudder in January 2025.

The Others (January 1) Credit – Dimension Films

The Others is a gothic supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Alejandro Amenabar. The 2001 film follows Grace as she moves in a Jersey house with her three children but she soon begins experiencing strange occurrences and becomes convinced that the house is haunted. The Others stars Nicole Kidman, Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Eccleston, Elaine Cassidy, Eric Sykes,...

When it comes to nightmarish, grounded horror stories, less is always more. Pascal Plante's psychological thriller Red Rooms follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a true-crime-obsessed model who is closely following and attending the trial of accused serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). This is a particularly disturbing case, as the killer broadcast his three teenage victims' brutal torture and murder onto the dark web. However, only two of the three videos were recovered by the police. As Kelly-Anne searches for the missing snuff film, her obsession spirals into a psychological nightmare. What is most fascinating about this film is how little of the tapes are shown. By only presenting the audience with sound bytes and character reactions, Pascal creates an audiovisual terror where ambiguity is clearly more effective than blatant visuals, both in its scares and in commentary on the exploitative nature of true crime.

Jay Baruchel has boarded Chandler Levack’s romantic comedy Mile End Kicks, which also stars Barbie Ferreira, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Set in 2011 in Montreal’s indie music scene, the film follows Grace Pine (Ferreira), a 24-year-old music critic who moves to the Canadian city to write a book on Alanis Morissette’s classic Jagged Little Pill album. But her plans take an unexpected turn when she gets romantically involved with members of an indie band for whom she serves as their publicist.

Mile End Kicks, the Canadian indie from producers Zapruder Films and Banner House Productions, gets Baruchel back together with the production team behind Blackberry. Baruchel co-starred in Matt Johnson’s tale of the once-revolutionary cel phone invention out of Waterloo, Ontario, and the band of uber-nerd techies at Research in Motion who made it happen.

The indie also stars Devon Bostick, Stanley Simons and Juliette Gariépy,...

Jay Baruchel has reunited with the production team behind indie hit “Blackberry” on the upcoming rom-com “Mile End Kicks.”

The film, written and directed by Chandler Levack (“I Like Movies”), has just wrapped production in Montreal, and also stars Barbie Ferreira (“Euphoria”), Devon Bostick (“Oppenheimer”) Stanley Simons (“The Iron Claw”) and Juliette Gariépy (“Red Rooms”). Beloved Montreal rock band Tops has written two original songs for the soundtrack, performed live by a fictional rock group in the film.

The film is a Banner House Productions/Zapruder Films production and is produced by Pat Kiely (“Three Night Stand”) and Matthew Miller (“BlackBerry”). XYZ Films is financing the project in conjunction with Ipr.Vc via its New Visions initiative.

In the film, Grace Pine (Ferreira), a 24-year-old music critic moves to Montreal in the summer of 2011 with the goal of writing a book about Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” Instead, she falls...

Real world inspirations and dark web folklore converge in Red Rooms, the third feature from Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante that has conjured much buzz since its U.S. theatrical release last month. Named after the fabled sinister backdrop of covertly circulated online snuff videos, the film dissects our culture’s obsession with gorey details. As the first day of a shocking murder trial unfolds in a Montreal courthouse, the devilishly striking Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is first in line to snag one of a handful of seats available to the public. The man on trial, bald and lanky Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), is […]

The post “There Is a Bombardment of Violent Images in Our Lives”: Director Pascal Plante on His High-Tech Serial Killer Drama Red Rooms first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Real world inspirations and dark web folklore converge in Red Rooms, the third feature from Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante that has conjured much buzz since its U.S. theatrical release last month. Named after the fabled sinister backdrop of covertly circulated online snuff videos, the film dissects our culture’s obsession with gorey details. As the first day of a shocking murder trial unfolds in a Montreal courthouse, the devilishly striking Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is first in line to snag one of a handful of seats available to the public. The man on trial, bald and lanky Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), is […]

The post “There Is a Bombardment of Violent Images in Our Lives”: Director Pascal Plante on His High-Tech Serial Killer Drama Red Rooms first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “Red Rooms.”]

If the definition of the word “hybristophilia” in the dictionary doesn’t appeal to you, read no further.

From a face-powdered Nicolas Cage in “Longlegs” to a hot Josh Hartnett in “Trap” and a loose riff on Night Stalker Richard Ramirez in “MaXXXine,” 2024 has seen a return of the serial killer movie to the mainstream. Enter “Red Rooms,” a perverse French-Canadian indie off the 2023 festival circuit, to flip the script on the genre — to squarely put you in the perspective of a true crime junkie chasing the total experience — and make you feel even more dirty and lost than any of those films ever could. It’s a movie even the director felt “sadistic” making.

With a great command of style, writer/director Pascal Plante’s moody and morbid thriller puts you in the eyes and ears of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a hacker and seemingly sociopathic woman obsessed...

A courtroom setting in cinema often suggests a story moving toward a binary outcome: innocent or guilty. But in his classification-defying thriller Red Rooms, writer-director Pascal Plante finds that the real drama lies in the ambiguities of his protagonist. Beneath the sharp exterior edges of Juliette Gariépy’s Kelly-Anne are the blurred distinctions of her moral compass, though she does let the latter show more in her activities on the dark web.

Kelly-Anne isn’t the person on trial in Red Rooms. The defendant, Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), stands accused of slaughtering three teen girls and broadcasting their deaths online. Yet it’s the mild-mannered murder groupie who attracts the attention of the cameras—both those of the courtroom reporters seen in the film and that of cinematographer Vincent Biron—as she descends into obsession. As the digitally savvy Kelly-Anne gets increasingly involved in the case’s intricate details and befriends a fellow eager observer,...

With spoilers, we look at Pascal Plante’s mesmerising thriller, Red Rooms, and how Arthurian legend might unlock the meaning of its final act.

Nb: The following contains major spoilers for Red Rooms.

Most movies are predictable, which is fine. There’s an appeal in seeing, say, Tom Cruise stuck in a deadly situation and seeing how he figures his way out of it. There’s entertainment in knowing the staples of a genre and watching as a skillful storyteller works within them – or in the case of Red Rooms, intelligently breaks them.

In Canadian writer-director Pascal Plante’s thriller Red Rooms, protagonist Kelly-Ann’s desires and goals are left enigmatically obscure. What she wants, exactly what she’s thinking, what her motivations might be, are kept away from us – and for some, remain tantalisingly open to interpretation even at the end. Red Rooms is many things, but it’s seldom predictable.

Stars: Juliette Gariépy, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, Guy Thauvette | Written and Directed by Pascal Plante

Well… what the hell was that all about? I will say though this was a technically well-executed movie. So much so that you find yourself bafflingly transfixed to the screen, for the most part wondering what it is exactly you are viewing and why. Then it hit me, I’m not supposed to have all the facts, I’m not supposed to really know anything, this movie just wants me to sit quietly and feel something. A sort of morbid curiosity that says more about me the viewer than the subjects of the movie. Somehow this movie has asked me to look at a part of my psyche I rarely think about.

Director Pascal Plante has brought us a movie that not only grips but also disturbs, invoking a...

Documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! with Trey Parker and Matt Stone cleaned up on one screen only in Denver and Tamil-language revenge thriller The Greatest Of All Time is the latest Indian film to pop at the North American box office with over $2 million on 530 screens for the three-day weekend and a cume of $3.5 million including previews, according to Comscore, as it sets records at home.

The Alamo Denver had Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in its biggest auditoriums with Casa Bonita showing at one 115-seater and sold out all weekend except for a a dozen or so tickets over Saturday and Sunday morning shows – meaning its $21.75k gross is about the top of what’s possible. The best per screen average for a doc post-Covid is Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Wild Life in 2023 at over $23k each on two screens.

Casa Bonita’s afternoon and evening showings were...

The big new release for the week is of course Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but that’s just one of six brand new genre movies now available in theaters and/or at home this week.

Here’s all the new horror that released Friday, September 6, 2024!

For daily reminders about new horror releases, be sure to follow @HorrorCalendar.

Brandy (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) returns to horror in the new A24 horror movie The Front Room, which was just released in theaters nationwide today.

What’s particularly interesting about the psychological horror movie is that it’s directed by Max and Sam Eggers, the brothers of Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Northman)!

This will be the debut feature for the Eggers Brothers, in fact. Variety had recently reported, “They adapted the screenplay from Susan Hill’s short story of the same name.”

The film “follows a young,...

(L-r) Laurie Babin as Clementine and Juliette Gariepy as Kelly-Anne, in Red Rooms. © Nemesis. Films. Courtesy of Utopia

Red Rooms, a suspenseful character study from Canada, is hard to rate. Some will love it; others will hate it; some will be scratching their heads trying to understand it.

Juliette Gariepy stars as Kelly-Anne, a svelte woman who is the unlikely combination of fashion model and computer genius, using the latter attribute mostly to make big bucks from on-line gambling. Both endeavors give her a lot of discretionary time.

Montreal is mesmerized by the trial of a suspect for the abduction, killing, maiming and snuff-film selling done to three girls in their early teens. There’s ample evidence pointing to him but none to definitively prove he’s the masked monster in the footage that was dealt on the dark web. The title is what the pervs of that ilk call...

Red Rooms is a chilling psychological thriller directed by Pascal Plante. The film explores obsession and moral ambiguity. The film centres on Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a fashion model consumed by a dark fascination with the trial of a notorious serial killer.

The story revolves around the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of torturing and murdering 3 teenage girls in a so-called “red room”. While Red Rooms never shows any of the violent acts, Plante skilfully builds a deeply disturbing atmosphere, keeping most of the horror within the courtroom’s confined space.

Gariépy’s portrayal of Kelly-Anne is mesmerising. Her character spends sleepless nights outside the Montreal courthouse, her obsession palpable through her blank stares and suppressed euphoria. Plante’s direction heightens this intensity, using long, quiet shots to mirror Kelly-Anne’s emotional detachment, ultimately positioning her as a more unsettling presence than the man on trial.

Kelly-Anne’s hollow...

Just because everyone is talking about Venice, Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF right now doesn’t mean theaters have suddenly stopped opening new movies near you. Some of them are even the same films playing at those festivals too.

There are a ton of titles dropping this September despite only having four Fridays. Then you add the streaming titles. And the VOD titles. The play for your attention is real. Sadly, I don’t think a glowing T-square is the way to go towards that pursuit … although I am intrigued to discover the purpose behind the choice.

So, if you want to judge a book by its cover to help whittle down your selection, here are a few good ones to help the cause.

Unique views

I know nothing about Sheldon Wilson’s Believer, but the poster has me wanting to learn more. Not only is it aesthetically interesting in its...

A chilling, skin-crawling experience, "Red Rooms" is the most disturbing horror movie of the year. No hyperbole here: Pascal Plante's ice-cold thriller left me stunned on more than one occasion. It is a bleak, cutting film that has a way of disquieting your mind with long, lingering shots. Most of these shots are trained on the silent, indecipherable face of star Juliette Gariépy, who is shockingly good here doing so much while saying so little. Gariépy is Kelly-Anne, a French-Canadian model who has become obsessed with an accused serial killer. When she's not on a fashion shoot, playing online poker, or haunting her cold, sparse high-rise apartment — a place where the wind constantly howls outside like voices of the damned — Kelly-Anne is sleeping on the streets outside of the courthouse so she can get a good seat at the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), nicknamed the Demon of Rosemont.

Quebec filmmaker Pascal Plante, known for Fake Tattoos and the critically hailed Nadia, Butterfly, shifts his creative gaze to darker territories in his latest offering, Red Rooms, which provides an intriguing spin on the ubiquitous serial killer genre. The story orbits around tech-savvy Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a seemingly successful woman with a semi-professional modeling career and a knack for online poker. Yet, her societal image is marred by her unwavering fascination with serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), aka the Demon of Rosemont. Kelly-Anne's obsession appears to verge on pathological, as she attends his court proceedings with keen interest. The film introduces Chevalier not as an active player but a fringe element, his gruesome deeds serving as the narrative fulcrum. Kelly-Anne has become a serial...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

In part 1 of our interview, Red Rooms filmmaker Pascal Plante talked extensively about how individual scenes were designed and shot. In part 2, we got more into the musical score and the ethics of making his thriller. Red Rooms opens Friday in limited release via Utopia. You were just talking about the opening where she [Kelly-Anne played by Juliette Gariépy] wakes up. Part of what immediately drew me in is the score, that incredible classical piece that Dominique [Plante] wrote. And I was curious, did you two talk about sort of the genres and the types of music that he would create beforehand, or did he come up with all of that and then bring it to you? Because it goes from classical to...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

“Why true crime?” is a question you may have asked others or perhaps yourself, depending on where you fall within the true crime industrial complex that has permeated popular culture. Even classifying true crime as “popular culture” feels irresponsible, but that’s exactly what it is: the massive popularity of the Serial podcast and Netflix serial killer fictionalizations like Dahmer have captivated the same morbidly curious generation that grew up with the Oj Simpson trial, Unsolved Mysteries, and Rotten.com— we’ve just further normalized it and have become increasingly comfortable with our fascination of it. But should we be?

Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is the rare variant of a psychological serial killer movie in that it’s never about the actual serial killer. It’s not that the killer in question is kept hidden from the viewer, as his face is revealed with the first five minutes of...

In Martin Kudlac's review of Red Rooms, he writes about how the film draws on Michael Haneke, its "enigmatic" protagonist Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), and the ways it repeatedly "bucks genre expectations" as a film ostensibly about a serial killer. More than a year later -- the film has had a long road to US distribution -- I was lucky enough to sit down with Plante and ask him about all these aspects Martin discusses in his review and more. In stark distinction to the sometimes cold, sometimes brutal film, Plante is one of the kindest and most affable filmmakers I've had the pleasure of speaking with. Albeit, it certainly helps the conversation that we have similar music taste and feelings about the difference between horror...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Red Rooms introduces us to a fascinating exploration of obsession and the unsettling ways it can manifest. The film follows fashion model Kelly-Anne as she becomes fixated on the high-profile trial of alleged serial killer Ludovic Chevalier. We see Kelly-Anne immerse herself deeply in the disturbing case, attending the proceedings religiously and diving deeper into the dark corners of the internet.

Written and directed by Pascal Plante, Red Rooms stars Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne. Her chilling performance anchors the film as our view into this compelling character’s growing fixation. Kelly-Anne forms an unlikely bond with another court regular, the erratic Clementine, played sincerely by Laurie Babin. Through these women, the film offers insightful perspectives on society’s modern fascinations with true crime.

Plante crafts an unsettling atmosphere that steadily increases tension. He explores the lines between interest and obsession and how digital culture can potentially warp certain minds. The...

Killers of the Flower Moon‘s epilogue felt like the last word on true crime: a director with several based-on-a-true-story tales to his name emerging from behind the camera to highlight the shortcomings of a genre that reduces victims to collateral damage in stories more compelled by their killers. That it arrived as splashy courtroom dramas made a big comeback––and even partially falling into that category itself––was an accident, but taken alongside the likes of Anatomy of a Fall or Saint Omer, it was clear that a need to tackle the subjectivity of this genre, and our obsession as uninvolved observers, was in the air.

Arriving more than a year after its Karlovy Vary premiere, Canadian thriller Red Rooms feels most like a dark companion piece to Saint Omer in its perspective-shifting analysis of a courtroom observer, although that’s where the similarities end. Director Pascal Plante’s...

Juliette Gariépy’s disquieting performance overcomes the more unbelievable elements of this tale of snuff-movie murder rooms

A lead performance of pure sociopathic intensity is what makes this serial-killer horror stand out. It is a movie which never shows the horrific violence on screen and prefers to stay largely within the rhetorical limits of courtroom procedural, though with a shiver of revulsion that could put you in mind of Cronenberg or Refn. Canadian film-maker Pascale Plante writes and directs, and relative newcomer Juliette Gariépy is genuinely unsettling as Kelly-Anne, a fashion model who has become obsessed with the ongoing trial of an alleged serial killer (Maxwell McCabe-Locas). Nicknamed the Demon of Rosemont, he is accused of kidnapping and torturing three teenage girls in a so-called “red room”, an urban-mythic place on the dark web where livestreamed snuff porn can supposedly be watched in exchange for cryptocurrency payment.

Kelly-Anne camps out...

Writer-director Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms opens with what sounds like a variation on the Handel music used in Barry Lyndon. Composer Dominique Plante’s eerie score is layered atop the pre-dawn routine of model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) as she heads out not to work but a courthouse where a sensationalized murder case is set to begin. The trial concerns one Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who stands accused of the brutal murder of three teenage girls whose deaths were recorded for distribution on the dark web.

As opening arguments in the trial begin, Plante lays out a meticulous aesthetic of slow tracking movements and long takes. When the prosecutor shows the jury photos of the deceased, the camera doesn’t cut to the screen showing the dead girls, instead slowly moving toward one of the TVs displaying the images, circumventing a lurid fetishizing of their innocent faces. Only in a few,...

The most wonderful time of the year is at hand: Halloween season has arrived. The signs are everywhere, from the cooling weather to pumpkin spice-flavored treats and beyond. But the biggest telltale sign of Halloween is arguably the overwhelming slate of horror releases packed into September and October to ensure maximum fright for the holiest of horror holidays.

That means it’s Fall Horror Preview time.

It’s no surprise that this year offers another densely packed slate for the Halloween season; and trust us, there’s more horror on the way. Expect plenty of surprise release announcements in store as more streaming services debut their seasonal releases, schedules, and beyond.

Here’s Bloody Disgusting’s Fall Horror Preview 2024 to help with your Halloween watchlists.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – September 6 (Theaters)

The long-awaited sequel is nearly here, almost 40 years after the original classic arrived in theaters. A family tragedy brings three generations of the Deetz family home,...

Barbie Ferreira has lined up her first big rom-com!

The 27-year-old actress, who was a Euphoria favorite for her portrayal of Kat Hernandez, is set to star in the new romantic comedy Mile End Kicks, which is from writer-director Chandler Levack.

She’ll find herself wrapped up in a love triangle in the project, which is already in production in Montreal, Canada.

Keep reading to find out more…

Variety reported that Barbie will star in the movie alongside Devon Bostick, Stanley Simons and Juliette Gariepy.

According to the outlet, the movie “follows Grace Pine (Ferreira), a 24-year-old music critic who moves to Montreal intending to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Her plans take an unexpected turn when she becomes romantically involved with two members of the same struggling indie rock band and decides to become their publicist.”

Barbie will also act as an executive producer on the project.

Horror may not have as many iconic franchises as the 1990s, which produced some of the greatest films, including the Evil Dead trilogy, Scream, and Night of the Living Dead. However, modern horrors have unique ways of frightening viewers. In fact, a slew of outstanding horror films have been released in recent years, like Smile, Hereditary, and Midsommar, that captivated audiences with both jump scares and psychologically terrifying scenes.

With many more original concepts developing in the minds of horror filmmakers, we can expect numerous horror films in the future, much like Longlegs, which seemed like a breath of fresh air when it was released in July. The coming month alone features some of the most anticipated horror movies, ranging from anniversary re-releases to gripping thrillers. To that end, here's a list of every horror movie that will be released in September 2024.

Red Rooms Watch It in Theaters on September 6

Red Rooms,...

"What motivated you to attend the trial?" A question you might not want to know the answer to... Utopia has revealed an official US trailer for an indie psychological thriller / horror film from Montreal, Canada called Red Rooms, originally titled Les Chambres Rouges in French. This first premiered at the 2023 Karlovy Vary Film Festival last year, and it also played at numerous other fests including up at Fantasia in Montreal. Opening in the US this fall in art house theaters. This chilling thriller, described as "true-crime meets genre cinema," follows a woman who becomes obsessed with following a high-profile murder trial of a suspected serial killer who made videos. Named after the highly disputed violent dark web spaces known as "red rooms" in online urban legends, the film was inspired by the fans who inexplicably flock to serial killers throughout modern history. Featuring captivating performances from the 3 leads - Quebec...

A serial killer obsession spirals into psychological horror in writer/director Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, and a new trailer inmtroduces the critically acclaimed feature’s blend of true crime and horror thrills.

Utopia releases Red Rooms on September 6 at the IFC Center in New York with Plante in attendance for opening weekend and a national rollout to follow.

The psychological cyber thriller follows “Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a young woman who wakes up every morning to wait outside the courtroom to secure a seat at the high-profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier, a man charged with the murder of three teenage girls, with the gruesome videos of two of the crimes surfacing for sale online on the dark web. She finds herself bonding with a fellow voyeur, momentarily breaking her out of her loneliness, while also witnessing the emotional decline of the victims’ families. As the proceedings continue, it becomes increasingly...

There’s “room” for more than just Lisbeth Salander in the world of cinematic cyber serial killer thrillers.

IndieWire premieres the exclusive trailer for Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante’s “Red Rooms,” out September 6 in select theaters from Utopia. The thriller about a voyeuristic model (Juliette Gariépy) who becomes obsessed with a high-profile murder trial swept up four prizes at last year’s Fantasia genre festival in Montreal, including Outstanding Performance for Gariépy, Best Screenplay for Plante, Best Score for Dominique Plante, and Best Film. Last year, “Red Rooms” also competed for the Crystal Globe, the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czech Republic.

Here’s the official synopsis: The film “follows Kelly-Anne (Gariépy), a young woman who wakes up every morning to wait outside the courtroom to secure a seat at the high-profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man charged with the murder of three teenage girls,...

Red Rooms.A little irony from the land of Alanis Morissette: Red Rooms (2023)—a movie named for and concerning a series of apocryphal dark-web sites trafficking in unsimulated snuff videos—is currently unavailable for commercial streaming in the United States. This despite the fact that Pascal Plante’s Montreal-set thriller, which is up for six Canadian Screen Awards on May 30, is almost perfectly calibrated for American—which is to say global—sensibilities, to the point that it suggests a prestige streaming procedural shrunken down to feature length and fed through Google Translate. The only thing separating Juliette Gariépy’s statuesque, possibly sociopathic amateur hacker Kelly-Anne from her Scandinavian counterparts is the lack of a dragon tattoo.This is not a put-down, nor even a backhanded compliment; in a year when the CSAs will likely be swept by Blackberry (2023), a revision of The Social Network (2010) by a group of resourceful Toronto pranksters,...

For most of the runtime of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, we are unsure about what exactly Kelly-Anne, our protagonist, is up to, let alone the reason behind her activities. Yet, the film is incredibly engaging from the opening minute itself. In fact, the ambiguity about the central character, which is certainly a deliberate creative choice, works in the film’s favor. Even when Red Rooms ends, you are unsure about the true nature of Kelly-Anne, which ensures you will be spending so many hours on Reddit. I’m going to take a swing at simplifying things and, hopefully, helping you understand what’s really going on in Red Rooms.

Spoilers Ahead

Plot Synopsis: What Happens In The Movie?

In the still of the night, Kelly-Anne wakes up in a back alley. After a walk in the streets of Montreal, she ends up at the courthouse, awaiting a murder trial to begin.

Anyone who knows me would say my taste runs ever so slightly counter to the popular opinion but up top I wanted to shout out some big titles that I appreciate but didn’t quite make my favorites list. Oftentimes it feels like the days of true-blue horror icons are behind us, but Gerard Johnstone and Akela Cooper’s M3GAN was a veritable hoot that gave us an instantly iconic tiny terror in tights who more than lived up to the memes and showed everyone that hasn’t quite come around yet on HBO’s Girls just how #mother Allison Williams is. Also, that Skatt Brothers “Walk the Night” needle drop took up residence in my head last January and has not left. Talk to Me was one of the more intense in-theater experiences I had this year, and though it lost something the more I sat with it, what...

As the year comes to a close, we look back on all of the wonderful moments that cinema has provided. We’ve got a nice mix of films that took the box office by storm and lesser-seen gems that you really should take the time to check out yourself. From an angry pilgrim to something in the walls, all the way to rich people and the strange things they do for kicks, we’re covering them all because this is Our 10 Favorite Horror Films of 2023.

First off, it wouldn’t be an incredible year if I didn’t have a ton of honorable mentions. So I wanted to make sure to give a shoutout to Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls as one of the best horror comedies of the year, It Lives Inside for its Indian slant on a familiar tale, Talk to Me with its phenomenal cinematography,...

Montreal-based h264 reports sales in more than 25 territories on Pascal Plante’s Fantasia best film winner.

Pascal Plante’s Fantasia best film winner and recent BFI London Film Festival and Busan selection Red Rooms has continued to attract buyers, with Montreal-based h264 reporting more than 25 territory sales including to the UK, and Eastern Europe.

Vertigo Releasing has acquired the cyber thriller for the UK, HBO will distribute in Eastern Europe, and Rwv Studio will release in Cis and the Baltics.

As previously announced, Utopia holds US rights, La Aventura will distribute in Spain, Hooray Films in Taiwan, and Njuta in Scandinavia except Norway,...

British thriller Femme was also on the prize list.

The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal has revealed the winners of its jury awards, with Canadian cyber thriller Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) named best feature in the event’s Cheval Noir competition section.

Red Rooms also won the best screenplay prize for Quebec writer-director Pascal Plante, the best score award for Dominique Plante and one of the two outstanding performance awards for Juliette Gariépy.

The Cheval Noir best director award went to Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping for their UK thriller Femme, whose Nathan Stewart-Jarrett won the other outstanding performance award.

The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal is more than halfway through its 27th edition, which is running from July 20th through August 9th – and over the weekend they unveiled their list of Fantasia Film Festival Awards winners, with major honors going to the likes of Red Rooms and Stay Online.

Our own reviewer Tyler Nichols gave Red Rooms a 9/10 “amazing” review (you can read it Here), so it makes sense to hear that the film racked up multiple awards, including Best Feature, Best Screenplay for Pascal Plante, Best Score for Dominique Plante, and Outstanding Performance for Juliette Gariépy. We haven’t had the chance to see Stay Online yet, but that movie did earn the Best First Feature award for director Yeva Strelnikova.

Red Rooms is about what happens when the case of a serial killer who streamed his murders in the “red rooms” of the Dark Web goes to trial,...

Red Rooms won a leading three awards including Best Feature at the 27th annual Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, with the thriller Femme taking Best Director for Sam H. Freeman & Ng Choon Ping and Outstanding Performance for Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. See the full list of winners below.

“The ultimate effect a film can achieve is to implant a significant and lasting emotional memory,” the genre fest’s jury said in a statement. “The jury was unanimously convinced that [Red Rooms] masterfully accomplished that goal.”

In writer-director Pascal Plante’s thriller from Nemesis Films, the case of a serial killer who streamed his murders in the “red rooms” of the Dark Web goes to trial, and Kelly-Anne (Laurie Babin) is obsessed. She goes down a dark path to obtain the final piece of the case’s puzzle.

In Femme, after drag artist Jules (Stewart-Jarrett) sees his closeted assailant (George Mackay) at a gay sauna,...

Juliette Gariépy in the Quebec thriller Red Rooms in Competition at Karlovy Vary Photo: Courtesy of Kviff

Pascal Plante's Red Rooms, a brooding drama about a woman's obsession with the trial of a serial killer, has won the esteemed Cheval Noir prize at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival. Plante also received the award for Best Screenplay and his composer, Dominique Plante, won best score, while star Juliette Gariépy was named Best Actress.

“The ultimate effect a film can achieve is to implant a significant and lasting emotional memory. The jury was unanimously convinced that Les Chambres Rouges masterfully accomplished that goal," said the jury. "With incredible skill and artistry, without resorting to gore or violence, this film delivers not only an extremely disturbing and frightening experience but introduces you to characters and situations you may never forget."

This year's Satoshi Kon Award For Excellence In Animation went to...

Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges), a French-language thriller about a woman’s obsession with a high-profile serial killer case, took top honors as the Fantasia Film Festival handed out its juried Cheval Noir competition prizes this weekend.

After opening Fantasia’s 27th edition, the Canadian psychological drama earned Cheval Noirs for best feature, best screenplay for Pascal Plante and best score for Dominique Plante. Red Rooms also earned lead Juliette Gariépy an outstanding performance award.

Red Rooms had an international premiere at Fantasia after debuting at Karlovy Vary as part of the Crystal Global competition. The Fantasia jury at North America’s largest genre film festival, led by David Hewlett, also gave its best director prize to Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping for Femme, while the trophy for best cinematography went to Zelda Adams and John Adams for their work on Where the Devil Roams.

There was no escaping “Red Rooms” at Fantasia.

Awarded the Cheval Noir Award for best feature at the 27th edition of the fest, Pascal Plante’s film also took honors for screenplay and Dominique Plante’s haunting score, as well as an outstanding performance award for Juliette Gariépy.

“The ultimate effect a film can achieve is to implant a significant and lasting emotional memory. ‘Red Rooms’ masterfully accomplished that goal,” said jurors David Hewlett, Brenda Lieberman, Jourdain Searles, Virginie Sélavy and Gary Sherman.

“With incredible skill and artistry, without resorting to gore or violence, this film delivers not only an extremely disturbing and frightening experience but introduces you to characters and situations you may never forget.”

Produced by Nemesis Films, it takes on the trial of a man accused of murdering teenage girls and selling videos of his crimes online. But Plante wanted to focus on women who follow him.

Pascal Plante, on his second feature outing takes an original and forensic approach to what could have been a hackneyed subject: a serial killer.

Right from the start as he observes Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) start what looks like just another mundane day as she makes her way to the Superior Court of Quebec to observe the first day of the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is accused of three murders. The deeds themselves are gruesome enough but they have been live-streamed for payment on the dark web “red room.”

Kelly-Anne, it becomes clear, is obsessed with the killer and the various cases outlined in court. Her preoccupation with evil serves as a parallel to Society’s unhealthy obsession with the dark side of human nature.

Every day she slips into her ringside seat to view the proceedings by day and then by night explores the web and...

Plot: The high-profile case of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier has just gone to trial, and Kelly-Anne is obsessed. When reality blurs with her morbid fantasies, she goes down a dark path to seek the final piece of the puzzle: the missing video of a murdered 13-year-old girl, to whom Kelly-Anne bears a disturbing resemblance.

Review: There’s a certain level of expectation present when Fantasia selects the opening film for their festival. It sets the tone for the rest of the lineup of films so my hopes for Red Rooms were very high. Add to that the fact that the French (even of the Canadian variety) know how to do horror like no other, and I was very excited. Red Rooms hits a nerve almost immediately, diving deep into the trial of serial killer, Ludovic Chevalier. They set up the evidence in such a disturbing way, all without showing you anything.

Juliette Gariépy in Red Rooms. Director Pascal Plante: 'I do think about violence and its consequences. I prefer more psychological horror films which crawl under your skin and affect you' Photo: Courtesy of Kviff According to his research Red Rooms (Les Chambres rouges) director Pascal Plante has discovered than there are more than 5000 films or series out there listed under the category of “serial killer”.

The Quebec filmmaker - whose feature will open this year's Fantasia Film Festival - believes what he describes as “morbid fascination” with them has reached some kind of peak with the current enduring appeal of true crime series. He suggests his film is part cyber thriller, part courtroom drama, and almost anti the serial killer genre. It focusses on the trial of Ludovico Chevalier (played in a wordless performance by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is accused of murdering teenage girls and then selling the videos of his exploits.

Nicolas Cage is set to receive a career tribute award at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival, organizers announced on Thursday.

Fantasia earlier unveiled a world premiere for Sympathy for the Devil, which stars Cage and reunites director Yuval Adler with Joel Kinnaman after The Secrets We Keep. As part of that screening, North America’s largest genre fest will honor Cage in Montreal with this year’s Cheval Noir career achievement award after a four-decade run in Hollywood where his film credits include Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out the Dead, Con Air, Face/Off and Wild at Heart.

Fantasia will also close its 27th edition with We Are Zombies, from the Canadian cult film collective Rkss, led by François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. The film stars Megan Peta Hill, Alexandre Nachi and Derek Johns.

Fantasia in its final lineup announcements also booked world premieres for director Mark H. Rapaport’s comedy of discomfort Hippo,...

A central character in Pascal Plante’s disturbing thriller is a mousy-looking man, the sort of anonymous figure you wouldn’t give a second look, on trial for the brutal murders of three teenage girls, which he broadcast live on the dark web. And he’s not even the scariest person onscreen in Red Rooms (Les Chambres rouges).

That would be Kelly-Anne, played to chillingly icy perfection by Juliette Gariépy. For reasons never explained in the film — showcased at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival — successful fashion model Kelly-Anne has become obsessed with Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, personifying the banality of evil), whose case is being heard in a Montreal courtroom.

Although the killer is masked in two of the snuff videos (the third has gone unfound), there’s a preponderance of evidence against Chevalier, who sits alone in a booth like a modern-day Adolf Eichmann. He’s all the...