The best movies of the 2020s, so far: RED ROOMS

"The tragedy of Laura Palmer was that she was murdered. The tragedy for Audrey Horne is that she wasn't murdered."

Matt Murray

  This is a corrosive character study of Kelly-Ann, a crypto-femcel hacker who moonlights as a model, and her slow dissolve in the belly of a gruesome murder trial she willfully crawled into. Along with a groupie, Clementine, they dwell on a broad spectrum of True Crime fandom, from the annoying to the extreme. Unlike Clementine, Kelly-Ann isn't just a groupie of the alleged child killer, but also an amateur sleuth.

  She has devoted herself to digitally foraging for snuff films, hustling online poker games, and cyber-stalking the Mother of one of the three young victims. The wheels of justice turn slowly and she's intent on greasing the machine from the shadows no matter how much of her soul wilts in the process. One especially thrilling sequence is the most intense auction scene since Uncut Gems' opal bidding war and it functions as the most naked glimpse into what makes this woman tick. So many close-ups steep us in her dysphoria and, during night scenes where her stalking goes beyond the Internet, the light becomes diffused like we're peering at her through foggy hazmat goggles.

  Thankfully, she's not fully detached and apathetic—which has become a cliche with movies about the terminally online—but her emotions are definitely packed in ice. There are two key emotional breakthroughs but there are so many ways to interpret what she's feeling and why; is she driven by concern, attention, hubris, or morbid curiosity? It's never entirely clear what she gets out of it, what—or if—she has an end goal in mind, or what's even real by the end of it, but the voyage is nonetheless sickening.

  I've seen [more than enough] people make the case that she's cruel and has nothing but ill intentions but I don't just disagree with them: I have irrefutable evidence to the contrary. There are so many formal and narrative choices that point to something else, something much more layered and sad. One particularly shocking scene is the crux of the entire movie and people consistently miss the point of it.

  Annoyingly, David Fincher's GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO never got a sequel, but RED ROOMS is a phantom limb to scratch that elusive itch...the trade-off is that it leaves the rest of your skin crawling.