(Pascal Plante, Canada, 2023, 118 minutes)
In recent years, true crime has expanded from non-fiction books to podcasts, streaming series, and national conventions. For some, it's an interest; for others, it's an all-consuming passion. The latter describes Kelly-Anne (the remarkable Juliette Gariépy), a tech-savvy Quebec model obsessed with Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who stands accused of murdering and dismembering three teenage girls--and streaming it all live.
Kelly-Anne, who attends his trial daily, forms an odd friendship with a Chevalier super-fan (Laurie Babin) before breaking away to track down a crucial piece of evidence. Free from violence or gore, the chilly veneer recalls Klute, bolstered by a visual approach that suggests non-stop surveillance, and offers, most memorably, a deeply twisted protagonist.
Red Rooms plays Majestic Bay on Tues, May 14, at 8:30pm and SIFF Downtown on Wed, May 15, at 9:30pm. For more information, click here.
SEBASTIAN
(Mikko Mäkelä, UK/Finland/Belgium, 2024, 110 minutes)
Max (Scottish-Italian actor Ruaridh Mollica), a London writer, feels he can only really explore sex work as a topic if he plunges into it, so he has been operating under the name Sebastian and building a novel around his encounters. Though only 25, he feels like a failure because he hasn't published a book yet. When his literary agent encourages him to make the novel less repetitive, he ramps up his nocturnal activities at the expense of his freelance work, his social life, and possibly even his sanity.
Though Mollica is very good, Finnish-born filmmaker Mikko Mäkelä humanizes Max's mostly older clientele in a way that sometimes makes them more sympathetic, especially Jonathan Hyde as an erudite widower.
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