Horror is often at its most powerful when it forces us to confront the things we already know but desperately wish were not true. Red Rooms (2023), the unsettling Canadian thriller, operates in this space—on the knife’s edge between belief and knowledge, between the comfortable fiction that terrible things are rare aberrations and the cold, clinical reality that they are not.
The film’s central tension lies in the lie society tells itself: that evil is extraordinary, that the worst acts imaginable are only the stuff of urban legend, shadowy internet hysteria, or grotesque fiction. But Red Rooms dismantles this illusion with a slow, suffocating precision. The world is not as safe as we pretend it to be. The things we dismiss as paranoia or sensationalism—the whispered rumors of deep web atrocities, of snuff films, of children disappearing into the void—are not just stories. They are real, and they happen because people make them happen.
The trial at the center of Red Rooms is one of these cold, unflinching realities. Ludovic Chevalier, the accused, sits in his suit, his expression unreadable, as the court argues whether he is guilty of filming and broadcasting the torture of young girls. To the press, the public, and the law, the question remains unresolved—“innocent until proven guilty.”
But the film’s protagonist, Kelly-Anne, does not live in the world of doubt. She does not need a court’s judgment to confirm what she already knows. She has seen things, things that no one else can erase. The grainy, inhuman images of suffering that others dismiss as fake, as impossible, as not something people really do—she knows they are real. The film never lets us look at what she has seen, and yet we feel it, an unseen horror crawling beneath every frame.
This is the central theme of Red Rooms: the tension between those who cling to disbelief as a defense mechanism and those who have looked straight into the abyss. Society depends on the illusion that truly monstrous acts are statistical anomalies, one-in-a-million freak occurrences perpetrated by “monsters” rather than men. But Kelly-Anne knows better. Her body language, her haunted stillness, her quiet, methodical obsession with the case—all of it speaks to a fundamental, irreversible change. Once you know, you can never go back.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Red Rooms is the presence of Ludovic’s devoted fan, a young woman who attends every court session, hanging on every word with desperate, worshipful belief in the accused’s innocence. She represents the other side of the equation—not those who ignore horror but those who embrace it, who construct elaborate narratives to defend the indefensible. Her delusion is not just ignorance but a willful, perverse attachment to the belief that people are not as evil as they actually are. In her mind, Ludovic is a victim, a scapegoat of moral panic, a misunderstood figure caught in the hysteria of a world too quick to condemn.
Kelly-Anne, on the other hand, does not have the luxury of this belief. Her certainty is not faith—it is experience. And this is what makes her relationship to the case so unnerving. She does not act like someone seeking justice or revenge. She is beyond those things. She behaves like someone who has seen something so horrifying that it has burned away all illusions about the world. She is not obsessed with Ludovic’s guilt because she needs confirmation. She already knows. She is living with the knowledge that other people refuse to accept.
Red Rooms forces the audience to sit with a deeply uncomfortable truth: The world is not just home to violence—it is built on the collective denial of that violence. The reason so many refuse to believe in red rooms, in snuff films, in the trafficking and systematic destruction of the innocent, is not because of evidence to the contrary. It is because believing in these things means accepting a level of horror that would shatter the comfortable narratives we construct about civilization, safety, and morality.
This is why Red Rooms is so effective as a thriller. It does not ask if these things happen—it asks why people refuse to accept that they do. It understands that belief is not about truth; it is about psychological survival. Some people, like Kelly-Anne, carry the burden of knowing. Others, like the devoted fan, retreat into fantasy.
But there is no middle ground. There is no safe place between the lie and the truth. Once you know, you cannot unknow. And that is the real horror at the heart of Red Rooms.