Red Rooms (2023) review

Professional model/gambler/programmer Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) attends the trial for Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who's accused of recording himself torturing and murdering three teenage girls (and uploading the footage to the deepest pit of the Internet), and while there she makes "friends" with excitable Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who believes in Chevalier's innocence, despite evidence he's guilty.  It begins underwhelmingly with its mechanical courtroom proceedings but becomes slightly more human once Kelly-Anne and Clémentine spend time with each other sharing pizza and playing racquetball ... and then when Clémentine actually watches the depraved videos, is immediately disillusioned and exits the movie, it loses its sense of balance: Kelly-Anne flies over the maple tree, stalks one of the victims' mothers, is canned from her modelling career and dresses up like a cheerleader to get Chevalier's attention.  I respect Plante (who wrote the script) for attempting to do a "psychological study" of a "loner" - essentially gender-swapping a typical Paul Schrader "protagonist" - except it needed quite a few footnotes: I've met mentally unstable people, yet even they'd seek shelter during wintertime in Montreal.