In today’s Friday Feature, all the world’s a red room on the internet. Published October 24, 2025.

Maybe everything is the internet. Or maybe that’s how we see things now, whenever now is. Maybe we stream Red Rooms on the internet. Maybe when we say internet we also mean computer. Even if we don’t accept the misleading metaphor that the brain is a computer, we can see architectural and conceptual analogs for the computer, just as we see reality melting into the internet.

the courtroom, the squash court, the security lobby, the apartment, the parking garage, the bedroom

In Red Rooms, all of them are anonymous pre-fab sets that feed another conflation: filmic representation and so-called lived space, though it is hyper-alienated space. Or, let’s say hyper-alienating space doing exactly what it’s designed to do: separate bodies and dissociate minds. 

This is a sci-fi film, and a highly dystopic one. That it presents as courtroom drama is its foundational sleight of hand. The murder groupie can’t tell the courthouse is not a computer and because we see the world she sees—even if we aren’t sure how she sees it or what’s going on in her head—we start wondering if maybe we’re in a red room too. Or watching one wash over us. We are cast in that bad red light, only it’s washed out like everything else in all this institutional lighting.

In the scene where the courtroom is cleared of all people who aren’t directly involved in the case (and who is and isn’t directly involved?), we lurk outside the door with the troubled young drifter and the hacker gambler model while the red room recordings play inside (another room, another window). We peek through the crack in the door with the troubled young drifter. A medical attendant arrives, enters the courtroom, and as the door closes we catch a glimpse of the real: a person collapsed on the floor, presumably overwhelmed and incapacitated from seeing the video we have been spared all but the context for viewing. Of course, the courtroom is also a theater in a film in a computer.

I watched this movie alone at home one night during a heat wave, projected on a wall in the front room, two windows behind me open to the street. People in the building across the way can see what we’re watching if they care to. People downstairs can hear people scream in the horror movies we favor. What was it like to overhear Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Or Red Rooms, which has long quiet parts and moments where the sound design is a red room, rolling.

It was an unsettling experience. I felt depressed and anxious, but mostly strange and sort of empty or emptied. I wasn’t sure what I was watching, by which I mean I didn’t know if the film was going for verisimilitude or simulacrum. There were moments where a screen or window wavered or seemed about to melt or glitch. After the credit crawl, I backed up to the final pan from the single monitor to the floor-to-ceiling windows. Details are important: mise en scène is story set. Was there something I was supposed to catch in the distorted composite reflection and exterior view in the window? Was reality breaking down? Was the apartment smoldering? Had the murder groupie hacker gambler model hero gone up in smoke?

I perused online reviews, heading right back into the internet. I texted a friend after I saw that he’d logged it in a networked app, which felt like an icky behavioral progression after watching this film. He helped.

I’d have to watch it again, but I kind of thought it was supposed to be like the membrane between her compartmentalized realities essentially broke down and it was all just one big bad soup by the end of it.

No doubt there are all kinds of cues throughout the film that the tenuous distinction between the internet, the computer, the screen, and this flimsy, aggressively banal reality are breaking down. There does not seem to be a bed in Kelly-Ann’s flat: two names, two screens, no bed. She sleeps outside, and ends up in her chosen victim’s bedroom. What we see in films matters, and what we don’t see isn’t there (unless of course we hear it, as any horror film tells us). In that last shot, two monitors have become one, which goes blank, then becomes a TV that reframes Clémentine. The camera slides over to a window that functions like another screen: one that shows something through it but also on it. Maybe the waver in the glass isn’t necessary, but it also isn’t unrealistic, except in the sense that we all sort of see it the same way, from the same angle of perspective, regardless of our viewing situation. When we look at a window opening onto a city at night, with only the monitor behind us lighting the room, we see some strange things on that surface. But what we see depends on where we’re positioned, how focused our eyes are, how well we see in that light. Those factors are relatively controlled here—as, we are reminded, they are in every shot of every film—which in this case adds an eerie, hyper-real quality to the empty scene. It’s perfect. And that’s terrifying. Four out of five sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson