Red Rooms Blends Online Poker Thrills With Serial Killer Obsession

Kelly-Anne sleeps on courthouse steps every night. Not because she has nowhere else to be, but because she cannot risk losing a seat when the doors open in the morning. By day she watches, stone-faced, as accused serial killer Ludovic Chevalier faces charges of murdering several teenage girls. By night she crushes anonymous opponents in high-stakes online poker, bankrolling her obsession with Bitcoin winnings. Pascal Plante's Red Rooms is the rare thriller that makes technology feel genuinely menacing, and it does so by understanding, with uncomfortable precision, exactly how digital obsession funds itself.

A Character Study Wearing a Serial Killer Film's Clothes

Plante's setup borrows the familiar architecture of a courtroom thriller, then quietly dismantles it. Ludovic Chevalier (played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) stands accused of broadcasting the murders and dismemberments of teenage girls in so-called "red rooms" on the dark web. The case is horrific. But for Plante, that horror is, as Wired put it, "little more than a MacGuffin," a structural device that opens into something far more unnerving: a study of the fans and groupies who orbit killers. "The platforms have been milking that true-crime cow like crazy," Plante explained from his home in Montreal. "I'd watch a six-hour documentary about Ted Bundy, and there'd be a few shots of his fans. I wanted a movie about them."

That decision elevates Red Rooms well above genre convention. Named the most disturbing film of 2024 by SlashFilm and other genre critics, the film earned that designation not through gore but through the coldly specific portrait it draws of a woman whose inner life remains almost entirely opaque.

Kelly-Anne: Expressionless, Calculating, Impossible to Look Away From

Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne, a Quebecois fashion model whose emotional vacancy is the film's central, inexhaustible mystery. She gets in line outside the small courtroom every night, joining another trial "groupie," Clémentine (Laura Babin), whose interest in Chevalier Wired describes as "more clearly sycophantic." Where Clémentine's fascination reads as admiration, Kelly-Anne's reads as something harder to name.

Critics reached for extreme comparisons to describe her at the poker table. The Guardian called it "a serial-killer's pleasure at crushing her opponents," while The Hollywood Reporter noted that her emotionless nature makes her a "consistent winner." Vulture observes that Plante underscores her blankness with "wailing, operatic music that is as expressive as she is not," a deliberate stylistic choice that turns every silent scene into a kind of tension. Kelly-Anne doesn't flinch, doesn't betray curiosity, doesn't telegraph motive. Her poker face is not just metaphorical; it is her entire existence.

Critics praised Gariépy's performance as "shockingly good," with her emotional vacancy mirroring what one outlet called "the cold world she inhabits." When Vulture asks whether Kelly-Anne is drawn to Chevalier and his alleged acts or repulsed by them, it lands as the film's defining question, one that goes unanswered for most of the running time.

Online Poker as Financial Engine and Psychological Mirror

The poker sequences are not filler or atmosphere. They are load-bearing plot architecture. Kelly-Anne plays online poker with Bitcoin, accumulating winnings with the same cold efficiency she brings to every other aspect of her life. ScareTissue's analysis frames this precisely: "In Red Rooms, online poker is the financial engine behind Kelly-Anne's descent and a chilling metaphor for her psychological state."

The metaphor is functional as well as aesthetic. Those cryptocurrency-backed winnings give Kelly-Anne the funds to purchase a copy of a murder tape on the dark web, evidence that could ultimately unravel the case against Chevalier entirely. That plot turn, as ScareTissue notes, "blurs the line between Kelly-Anne as voyeur and vigilante." She is not simply watching the trial from a courthouse bench. She is actively shaping its outcome with money she won by behaving, at a virtual card table, exactly like the killer she cannot stop watching.

The Dark Web as Everyday Geography

Red Rooms distinguishes itself from most internet-horror by refusing to treat the dark web as supernatural territory. The film anchors its dread in what Chewie describes as "the everyday darkness of the internet: livestreamed torture rooms, cryptocurrency-funded murders, and poker games with life-altering stakes." Nothing about Kelly-Anne's navigation of these spaces suggests she finds them extraordinary. She moves through them with the same practiced ease she brings to courthouse queues and poker lobbies.

Her digital activity extends well beyond purchasing murder videos. Vulture details that Kelly-Anne spends significant time hacking into people's private lives, including accessing the email accounts and security codes of the grieving parents of Chevalier's alleged victims. She is not merely an obsessed spectator; she is an active, technically skilled participant whose intrusions carry real consequences for real people. Wired describes her as a "Quebecois fashion model who moonlights as an online poker stud and internet snoop," but that framing undersells how far her surveillance extends.

Technology That Actually Works

It is worth noting how rare it is for a thriller to handle its tech with this level of accuracy. Horror and thriller cinema routinely reaches for digital MacGuffins that bear no relationship to how networks, cryptocurrencies, or dark-web markets actually function. Red Rooms mostly gets it right, grounding each plot mechanism in plausible digital behavior rather than Hollywood shorthand. The Bitcoin transactions feel credible. The dark-web purchase follows a logic that maps onto real-world anonymized markets. That realism is part of what makes the film so unsettling: none of what Kelly-Anne does requires special skills or resources beyond what a determined, technically literate person could acquire.

Rooted in Reality

Plante drew partial inspiration from the 2012 case of Luka Magnotta, a Canadian killer who broadcast the murder of a young student online and was subsequently tracked down with the help of amateur internet sleuths. That case became the subject of the 2019 Netflix true crime series Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. Plante transplants the dynamics of that real-world saga into a fictional setting while shifting the camera entirely away from the perpetrator and onto the audience surrounding him.

The result is a film that implicates true-crime fandom without moralizing about it. Vulture's assessment captures the effect precisely: Kelly-Anne's psyche, "combined with the ease with which she moves through the shady corners of the internet, present a portrait of a very modern soul, unreadable, unstable, and unsettling."

Spiritual Savagery Without a Drop of Blood

What makes Red Rooms genuinely difficult to shake is Plante's commitment to achieving horror through subtraction. There is no onscreen bloodshed. The murders are described in courtroom testimony, not shown. Kelly-Anne's poker face offers no emotional release valve for the audience. The operatic score does the emoting she will not. The result, as Vulture puts it, is "no real bloodshed in Red Rooms, but there is a kind of spiritual savagery."

That savagery is located not in what Chevalier did, but in what Kelly-Anne is willing to do to be near it. Sleeping on steps. Hacking grieving parents. Buying evidence with poker winnings. All of it performed with the flat affect of someone filling out a tax return. The film named most disturbing of 2024 earned that distinction without a single slasher sequence, and that, more than any technical detail about cryptocurrency or dark-web markets, is the measure of what Pascal Plante actually built.