A Canadian film by a director I’ve never heard of and starring no one of note comes with no great expectations. Yet it is one of the most intense crime thrillers I’ve watched in years and is far and away the most realistic depiction of how a real-life hacker operates I’ve ever seen. The subject of livestreamed torture rooms is shocking enough and seems impossibly difficult to handle in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative. Yet Red Rooms goes one better by diving into the psyche of the kind of person who is obsessed with such content. A superlative film on all counts.

Kelly-Anne, a tall and well-dressed woman, sleeps rough on the streets of Montreal in order to get in line early to attend a high profile trial. Ludovic Chevalier is accused of torturing and murdering three teenaged girls, streaming the process online in secret chat rooms called Red Rooms. The defense pleads not guilty, claiming that as the murderer wears a balaclava on the recovered videos, the prosecution is unable to prove that it is Chevalier. Yet Kelly-Anne is actually wealthy. She lives in a high-rise apartment and makes money both by being a fashion model and playing poker online. She is mathematically brilliant and technically knowledgeable enough to have her own local AI manage her computer. She is befriended by Clementine who is also obsessed with the case. The younger woman has hitchhiked a long way to get to Montreal and sleeps in the streets out of necessity to save money. She is convinced that Chevalier is innocent and is there to support him. The family of the victims condemn them as disgusting groupies but are legally unable to bar them from court. On the day that the snuff films are shown, the judge closes the court to the general public, angering Clementine. Kelly-Anne however reveals that she has already obtained and watched the videos.

Written and directed by Pascal Plante, Red Rooms is such a marvel of efficient storytelling. With neither narration nor dialogue, we’re left to wonder why a fashionably dressed woman like Kelly-Anne is sleeping on the streets. At the opening of the trial, both of the prosecutor and the defense lawyer lay out the facts of the case in exacting detail and then are not heard from again because this is not actually a courtroom drama. We are shown, not told about, her competence. She casually plays high stakes online poker games while multitasking. When she investigates the background of the mother of one of the victims, it’s not just frantic keyboard bashing like in so many other hacking scenes. Instead she checks the mother’s social media accounts, searches her accounts on online databases of leaked passwords, tries them to get into her emails and so on. Most of all, we can see how reserved and unemotional she is. She responds with cool wariness when Clementine approaches her, she is unaffected by the testimonies in the courtroom. So it is shocking that the one time her face alights in ecstatic joy is when she gain access to the one snuff video that is missing from her collection. The film assumes an intelligent audience who is paying attention and so gets its point across effectively and powerfully.

Red Rooms is also brilliant in that its focus is on neither the murderer nor the victims but on the fans who have become obsessed with the case. That feels apt in light how popular the so-called true crime genre is these days. Clementine represents one type of groupie who sympathizes serial killers, write letters to them and sometimes falls in love with them. She thinks Chevalier isn’t as evil as everyone makes him out to be and that she can fix him. More fascinating still is Kelly-Anne who has determined on her own that he is indeed guilty and is drawn to him because of that. She gets an emotional high from watching his videos and actively tries to draw his attention, probably to get a visible reaction out of him. A lesser director might have had her obsession overwhelm her common sense but that’s not the case here. She has enough of a sense of self-preservation to cover her tracks, is actually cognizant that Chevalier is evil and still has enough of a moral compass to feel sorry for Clementine. That makes her such a complex and hence scary character. It goes without saying that she is both legally and morally in the wrong. By actually paying money for the videos, she contributes to the existence of people like Chevalier even if she doesn’t participate in the killings herself.

I honestly can’t think of a single flaw in this film. The writing is as smart as its protagonist with a clever opening that is just the right kind of misdirection. The detailed descriptions of Chevalier’s crimes in court delivers all of the horror without the need to visually depict them. The visibly cold setting of Montreal with its greys and blues where everyone is wearing thick coats is the perfect complement to Kelly-Anne dispassionate demeanor. The setting is thoroughly modern, making informed use of the TOR network, cryptocurrencies, AI assistants and the like. It’s so rare to have a filmmaker get all these details right so I will certainly be on the lookout for more work by Plante.