The New Cult Canon: 'Red Rooms'

“Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut? He just needed a little space.” — “Guinevere,” Red Rooms

Before the internet existed—and certainly before the accelerants of broadband connections and social media—there was no ability for the public to experience traumatic images and videos without a great deal of vetting first. Much as we like to decry the “gatekeepers” that might stand between us and the raw, unvarnished truth of the world, responsible people in the media had to put some thought into how (or if) this information should be received by the public at large. When footage and photographs from the Vietnam War started finding their way into magazines or broadcast television, they shook our collective conscience, but they were never presented without warning or context. That they were deemed important and “newsworthy” did not shake their power to traumatize, but at least a process was in place to keep us outside the blast radius.

Now we are fully in the age of “doomscrolling,” a useful term to describe our addiction to the unpleasant content that jams up Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and every other social media feed. Yet even that term seems inadequate to describe the firehose of horror that confronts us with little warning, especially now that even fig-leaf moderation is treated like an egregious affront to the First Amendment. It is not uncommon, in the flow of the day, to witness smartphone videos of mass shootings, children in war zones, raids by ICE agents, or violent confrontations with the police. And as much as we might tell ourselves that it’s good to see the world as it truly is—though we have to put big fat scare quotes around the word “truth” in some instances—how much perspective can we claim to have on how it’s impacted us? What can we actually handle, physiologically, as human beings?

The French-Canadian shocker Red Rooms comes closer than any film I can recall in squaring up to the darkest implications of the digital age, particularly for those alienated souls known as the Extremely Online. (It’s not usually my habit to induct a film into The New Cult Canon only a year after its theatrical run, but no one I know who has seen Red Rooms has been left unshaken by it.) We don’t know enough about