2024 Catch-Up: Red Rooms, Crust

You take the great with the not-so-great.

One of the hardest things to do as a critic — especially one who more often writes professionally about TV — is to keep up with every cool-lookin' movie that comes out in a given year. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, a cold feeling hits my stomach: Best Of lists are forthcoming! Do I know where I stand? Have I seen enough films this year to have an opinion on the best among them? Every year, like clockwork, this happens to me.

Luckily, DoomRocket exists. If I want to write capsule reviews on a host of movies I'd missed out on until now, that's what it's there for!

So, with the holidays bearing down on us and general review coverage halted until the new year, that's what I'll be doing — catching up on all the festival darlings, off-the-beaten-path genre flicks, and VOD schlock-a-thons that have caught my eye since January 1, 2024. This is my road until this year's annual YEAR IN REVIEW, which drops in the last week of December, so stay tuned for that.

Now! What's been good this year? Or, failing that, what's been decent, bad (but secretly good), or just plain rotten? Let's take a look.

RED ROOMS

It's easy to spot the visual and atmospheric influences of Pascal Plante's Red Rooms: Haneke, Żuławski, Fincher, and Assayas, they're all here. By establishing and then maximizing his sense of dread and doom, Plante deploys steady tracking shots, agonizing long takes (his first clocks in at a stunning twenty minutes), and sleek, sterile modernist sensibilities that feel like the bleeding edge of humanity's end. That's right where he wants us.

Pinning down the dramatic objectives of Red Rooms, at least for a good chunk of its runtime, is trickier. Its subject matter is consciously, almost defensively edgy, an attitude that would obscure Plante's intent had he made a more belligerent thriller. Instead, in an elusive bit of shadowplay, Red Rooms transcends this abrasiveness with an even temper that doesn't diminish the director's ability to shock.

It's mesmerizing how Plante unravels his inscrutable lead character, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), professional model by day and terminally online gambler/stalker by night. Kelly-Anne, we know, has been camping in an alleyway outside a courthouse every morning instead of her tidy high-rise condo. This enables her to sit in on the sensational trial of a pedophile killer, who we learn streamed his butchery on a dark web space called "red rooms." The killer has an unemployed groupie named Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who befriends Kelly-Anne and puzzles over her motives. As their unlikely friendship solidifies, disturbing aspects of Kelly-Anne's private life take shape, which prompts the question: where does she click to when the shades are drawn and the lights go out? Nowhere good.

I hesitate to call Red Rooms "voyeuristic" because that's too obvious. Kelly-Anne is a gawker of the murder case at the center of the film, her rapt attention perhaps a byproduct of the media's morbid sensationalism of it or something far worse. And we, too, can't help but gawk — at her placid gaze in the courtroom (despite the case's appalling details), at the disparate reactions of Clémentine and Kelly-Anne as they illicitly view one of the killer's recordings, at how Kelly-Anne involves herself in the case at the consequence of her safety and financial security. Voyeurism isn't the film's theme; it's its function.

Through twin computer screens, we watch Kelly-Anne embrace the festering awfulness she's long kept inside. What that might be is left to interpretation, which forces us to reckon with our own experiences with online anonymity. Who are we when we think no one is looking? What happens when we bring that version of ourselves into the big, bad world? At first, these ideas seem to converge a bit too neatly during its finale, but look closer: Plante isn't finished. He's telling us our darker nature roils underneath this digital cocoon we've created for ourselves, in a hell where who we are and what we're capable of waits to be exposed. Technology enhances what has always existed inside us, accelerates and weaponizes it, changing us for the worse and denying the better world we somehow hope still exists.

9 / 10

Written and directed by Pascal Plante.
Cinematography by Vincent Biron.
Starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Shagnon, and Guy Thauvette.
Produced by Dominique Dussault.

Unrated. Contains some genuinely grim shit.

CRUST

Sean Whalen, character actor turned indie film director, has a terrific face for movies. He has the quintessential "That Guy" magic: you see him, and you don't forget him. With wily eyes and a wide smile that conveys mirth and menace (sometimes at once), Whalen created a niche for himself with an eclectic pop culture résumé in the Nineties and Aughts: Men in Black, The People Under the Stairs, Batman Returns, Charlie's Angels, a host of commercials (he's Michael Bay's "Aaron Burr" guy), soap operas, and countless other TV credits. I think it's awesome he's taken that career capital and cashed it in on Crust, a movie about a cum-sock monster that snacks on laundromat customers.

Okay, Crust has a bit more going on than that, though I can't help but laugh at how the professional types tasked with marketing the movie massaged that premise for their press releases. They say the sock-beast is made from "bodily fluids," which is true enough; blood, sweat, and tears (all from Whalen's character) also provide the magic that animates it. Crust must have been tough to sell for those folks. It isn't a gross-out horror movie or an especially funny slacker comedy, two elements that could have collided into a demented cult oddity but sadly do not. In fact, one of the more frustrating things you might experience if you catch Crust is parsing what the hell it is you're supposed to be watching.

You also might be disappointed to discover its marquee attraction only takes up a small fraction of the film's bloated runtime, making it less a throwback creature feature than a sincere if unfocused treatise on faded celebrity. Whalen stars as Vegas Winters, a washed-up child star stuck in the laundromat racket alongside his alcoholic business partner Russ (Daniel Roebuck), taking abuse from local online influencers as he collects all those socks that go missing whenever we do a wash. When his old sitcom gets rebooted, just before he accidentally brings his sock puppet friend to life, Vegas is forced to reckon with his deadbeat present as it collides with his past, which brings into his orbit Nila (Rebekah Kennedy), a quirky customer who's attracted to him despite his heavy drinking, surly mood, and chronic tendency to masturbate.

Vegas is a mess, and so is Crust. Shooting in black and white, Whalen employs similar Gen-X loser-dude tropes as Kevin Smith's Clerks, where an obnoxious go-nowhere schlub is surrounded by adoring friends and fawning manic pixie dreamgirls yet the audience is still expected to care about their plight. He forgets the sharp, eminently quotable dialogue that made Smith's register cretins fun to watch, but to his credit, Whalen tosses this energy out with the lint during the film's final stretch with an unexpectedly vicious twist that adds color (textual and otherwise) to Vegas's sad-sack saga, kickstarting what I'm sure Whalen hopes will be future installments.

I'm not convinced there's enough detergent in the machine. Still, if anyone understands the angst of languishing in the periphery of Tinseltown, it's Whalen, and in his film's more lucid moments, Crust almost pulls off his bizarre thesis on toxic fame. (Helping Whalen get his points across are other graying A-Tier That Guys like Roebuck, Ricky Dean Logan, and Alan Ruck.) Perhaps time will starch his ideas: Whalen, who turned 60 this year, embraces his receding hairline and faded grunge-kid peculiarity to maximize Vegas's unappealing nature, a humble and wise creative decision that speaks to his movie’s tumbling themes. It also creates a notable contrast when Vegas and Crust break out from their laundromat hell late in the film: here, Whalen seems revitalized — hell, he looks like Richard E. Grant's nepo kid run amok, a bona fide Sud Muffin ready for his sequel. Now that I’m thinking about it, so am I.

4.5 / 10

Crust is available on Blu-ray December 10. To snag a copy, click this.

Directed by Sean Whalen.
Written by Sean Whalen and Jim Wald.
Cinematography by Jaren Lewis.
Starring Sean Whalen, Daniel Roebuck, Rebekah Kennedy, Felissa Rose, Ricky Dean Logan, Shawntay Dalon, and Alan Ruck.
Produced by Jacques Wiley, Chris Bevins, Jeremy Hirsch, Pat Whalen, and Barbara Whalen.

Unrated. Things get sticky.