I don’t often watch a movie the day I learn about it. I gotta wait for the stars to align. For the vibes to coalesce. I think the last time I did was Wizards. (Which was super worth it. Go watch Wizards.) Today I saw a gifset on tumblr, and, when checking the tags to figure out what it was from, I saw that half the people who had reblogged it were calling it ‘the most evil scene I had ever seen in a movie.’ And that is a recommendation that is hard to pass up.
I love a thriller, is the thing. And a good thriller is an engendered species. Most major streaming services don’t have a dedicated thriller sections. They get shunted in with either horror or dramas. A lot of them, like Red Rooms, eventually end up on Shudder to a wave of a bunch of comments mad that it’s a thriller and not a horror movie. But god, where else can they go? It’s a genre that’s mostly been abandoned.
Which I do understand. Technological advancements have not been kind to the legal/investigative thriller especially. DNA, facial recogniation, gps tracking of cell phones—all bad for the thriller. Because a thriller thrives on tension. On doubt. If you can solve your central mystery with a smoking gun that you need a simple lab test to obtain, it is very hard to create tension, or doubt.
Which is why this film is so clever. It takes the limitations in these technologies, and our current online misinformation problem, and uses that to create the tension. The doubt. Clementine, the serial killer’s groupie, is convinced all the information obtained by traditional means is fake, the dna, the facial recognition, the human remains the the guy’s backyard, because she is in an online info-sphere that Believes this man is not the killer, and so all evidence to the contrary cannot be real.
Which, besides being a really insightful commentary on the increasingly splintered reality we all live in, is a really effective solution to the ‘tech has made the thriller obsolete’ problem. Red Rooms posits that the thriller is still possible, because people will Doubt whatever is put in front of them, if they do not have the willingness to See and Believe.
And oh boy does this movie have a lot to say about Looking. It is time to talk about the Arthurian elements now. Sorry, but it’s still me, so you aren’t getting away from it. They’re threaded throughout the film: Kelly-Anne’s personal AI assistant is named the French variation on Guinevere. Kelly-Anne’s desktop background is the Lady of Shallot (can’t quite place the exact painting, but it might be the Grimshaw), and her deep web hacker handle is the same. Even the serial killer’s last name mean’s ‘knight’ in French, and one of the victim’s, while spelled differently, is pronounced like the French word for king.
And this would all be set dressing if not for the core of Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot (where most of the cultural osmosis from that story come from, the older versions are very different. It’s Tennyson who introduces her captivity, and the curse element.) Short version: the Lady of Shallot can never leave her tower, and can never look directly at the outside world. She weaves at a loom, and watches the outside world through a mirror aimed at a window. One day, Lancelot passes by, and she looks directly at him. The mirror cracks, and she dies, putting herself on a fancy funeral barge and sailing down to Camelot.
It is not hard at all to see Kelly-Anne as a 21st century Lady of Shallot, sitting in her high rise apartment, playing her poker hands and watching videos of grieving mothers, until this serial killer with a knight’s name forces her to look away, come into the world, and doom herself. It’s not even a stretch to say she may see herself this way. It is her screen name. It is her desktop background. One of these things could be a fun coincidence, but all of them feels like intentional character detail.
“I am half sick of shadows”, says Tennyson’s lady, and so too, seems Kelly-Anne, who takes in a mostly homeless serial killer groupie, feeds her, teaches her racquetball to help ‘when they feel unstable’, and, ultimately, shows her the snuff films the serial killer they’re both obsessed with in what appears to be a genuine bid for human connection.
A bid that doesn’t work. A bid that has Clementine loose all faith in her steadfast belief that the killer is innocent, and also leaves her terrified of Kelly-Anne. Kickstarting a downward spiral that includes dressing up as the serial killer’s youngest victim in front of said victim’s grieving mother. A detail I mention here because it got me to watch the film, and I believe it is a perfect selling point. You learn that and you simply must see it in context.
We don’t know what happens to Kelly-Anne after the climatic scene, which is the tensest ‘woman sitting at a computer’ scene I have ever scene, which is a testament to the movie, really. So many scenes are essentially Kelly-Anne sitting at a computer switching between windows, and yet they are filled with So Much Dread. We don’t really know what happens to Kelly-Anne after we see her walking away from breaking into the victim’s mom’s house one last time, after taking selfies in her dead girl costume and leaving her hard won snuff film behind. We don’t know, but it is not hard to read it as Kelly-Anne’s funeral barge, her ‘deathsong’, her ‘longdrawn carol, mournful, holy’, if we turn back to the poem from where she takes her altar ego.
There is more to say here, the direct parallels between Kelly-Anne and the killer (the talk show people could be describing either of them when they say ‘lonely person who made a lucrative life doing thing’, her speech about online poker saying ‘you wait for the players who depend on luck. I like to bleed them dry.’) The potentially troubling conservatism of the trial portions that I would love to read something on by someone better versed in Quebecois politics. The way the snuff films are treated like a cognitohazard (they cause a juror to have a heart attack! Whatever Clementine sees in them, it’s enough for her to do a complete 180 on both her beliefs and her friendship. Kelly-Anne seems emotionally unscathed, sure, but she’s also going to trials dressed as a dead 13 year old, so.) But it’s the Arthurian stuff that caught me off guard, and that I feel best qualified to comment on.
Do I rec this? Absolutely yes. You already know if you like slow burn thrillers that are suffused with dread. Or, well, if you don’t know, probably don’t start here. Start with Silence of the Lambs or something. A classic. But you know what I mean. If you, like me, have been mourning the loss of the thriller as a cohesive genre, you have gotta check this out. It is fascinating, has what is now one of my favorite recent female characters in something, and is generally just a really tightly plotted movie. You won’t be disappointed.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 