‘Red Rooms’ Review — Has the internet melted reality?

A review of the true-crime thriller, on Shudder now

A couple of months ago, a film-loving friend texted me about the new French-Canadian thriller Red Rooms. “I think the feelings it’s working through on true crime might be up your alley,” he said. It took me a while to get around to the movie, but it’s on Shudder now, and he’s exactly correct. Thanks, Chris!

I’ve been writing online about true crime for many years at this point, tracking the “prestige true crime” genre as it’s evolved from Serial to The Jinx to Tiger King and beyond. The best of the genre wants us to examine our own complicity in consuming crime as entertainment; the worst true-crime reinforces everything that’s bad about the justice system by making us look to cops to solve everything.

Sometimes, though, we do actually need to leave the “solving” to the experts. There’s a burgeoning subgenre in the true-crime space right now, a group of films and shows that reckon with the “web sleuth” community — true crime fans who gather online, signal-boosting crime stories and conducting their own “investigations” that may or may not be tethered to reality. The Max documentary They Called Him Mostly Harmless is a good place to start. Paramount+ docuseries #Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders is another, more…