Reviews of 'Red Rooms,' 'DaaaaaaÍi,' and other unheralded recent feature films
A dark French Canadian take on true crime, a goofy pseudo-biopic of Salvador Dali, a drunken vehicle for Saoirse Ronan, the best movie yet about Reality Winner, and a Coen Brothers knockoff
Before we dive deeply into the fall movie lineup in the coming weeks, here are some capsule reviews of some recently released, under-the-radar films:
Red Rooms
Last year’s Anatomy of a Fall built a dramatic legal thriller around a court system very different from the one we Americans know. Now there’s director Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, a French Canadian psychological thriller that also begins in the courtroom, a trial of a man accused of broadcasting the especially gruesome torture and murder of three teenage girls.
But it goes to way, way worse places than there.
It builds into a deeply disturbing thriller that discusses the modern true-crime obsession and the unhealthy parasocial relationship many true-crime TV and podcast fans have with the genre. Many echoes exist, particularly of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial.
“Red Rooms” is a real-life urban legend, the kind of thing that used to happen on Criminal Minds: A killer holds people captive and kills them on a dark web livestream, sometimes for profit. In the film, the defendant, Ludovic Chevalier, is on trial for committing three such murders, although the man in the videos is masked, and his lawyer swears Chevalier wasn’t there.
Two women are obsessed with the case: Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is a rich fashion model who attends the trial daily and seems to have access to parts of the Internet that most people, especially fashion models, do not. Clementine (Laurie Babin), much less wealthy, has traveled to the trial, convinced to the point of obsession that Ludovic is innocent.
How does Kelly-Anne feel about the case? She keeps things a bit closer to the vest but seems to know a bit more about the case than she lets on.
Red Rooms holds its cards close to the vest at first, but things get really, truly wild in the third act, and the ending delivers.
The film lands on VOD Friday if you can stomach it. It also shows, among other things, just how shallow the satire is in the new Joker: Folie à Deux.
DaaaaaaÍi!
I had to look up whether I had the correct number of A’s in that title…
Quentin Dupieux, that French master of silliness, has made his latest film about the surrealist Salvador Dali, although any resemblances between this and Dali’s true story are likely purely coincidental.
Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) is a journalist given the opportunity to interview Dali, who is played at different times by five different actors.
None of them are my favorite fictional cinematic Dali, which remains Adrien Brody’s take in that great scene in Midnight in Paris, where he and his fellow surrealists are the only ones who can understand Owen Wilson’s plight.
Once again, if historical verisimilitude is what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here. But if it’s surrealism, you seek…
The Outrun
Every year, there are movies in which a great performance is in the service of a not-so-great movie. The first of those this fall is Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, which stars Saoirse Ronan as an alcoholic trying to pick up the pieces.
Based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot, who co-wrote the film, The Outrun has a complex narrative structure that goes back and forth through time, seemingly unnecessarily.
The film isn’t much, but Ronan, who’s been largely absent lately, is absolutely outstanding.
Winner
When it comes to movies about Reality Winner, the woman convicted of leaking classified documents a few years ago, there’s already been a documentary called Reality Winner and a fiction film called Reality, so why not another one, this time called Winner?
Winner, which debuted at Sundance and had an extremely perfunctory release last month, is the best of the three.
Directed by Susannah Fogel and written by journalist Kerry Howley – who also wrote a first-rate book called Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs that touched on the case— Winner is more of a fully-formed biopic of Winner, and how she ended up where she did.
Emilia Jones, from CODA, plays Winner, by the film is stolen by Zach Galifianakis, as her troubled father.
Greedy People
Yes, this is a Coen Brothers knockoff. But as such knockoffs go, it’s not bad.
Directed by the beautifully named Potsy Ponciroli, Greedy People has a plot that sounds like Coen karaoke, with a bunch of colorful characters in a small town dealing with the aftermath of a murder and the disappearance of a bag of money.
What this one has over most of the others is some fantastic characters, led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, cast against type as an amoral, good-ol’-boy cop. Coen mainstay Tim Blake Nelson is also on hand, along with Himesh Patel, Lily James, Simon Rex, Nina Arianda and Traci Lords (!).
This movie didn’t make much of a dent, but it’s worth a watch should it pop up on your VOD or airline menu.