Red Rooms ending explained: What was Kelly-Anne's motive?

Red Rooms is a haunting Canadian psychological thriller released in 2023 that recently became available to watch at home via digital retailers like Apple TV.

The chilling film follows a woman named Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), an obsessive voyeur following the high-profile serial killing trial of a man named Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). Chevalier is accused of killing three little girls and, worse than that, torturing them beforehand and creating snuff films to sell on the dark web. Kelly-Anne seemingly becomes determined to hunt down footage from within these "red rooms," though the reasoning behind her thought process is mostly left vague.

Major spoilers ahead for Red Rooms

Overall, Red Rooms is a disturbing and fraught thriller about our true crime community and its ugly, exploitative tendencies. It tries to get inside the mindset of serial killer obsessives, particularly those who believe they know these killers and understand them on a level no one else does. For this film, that mostly falls to a side character Clementine (Laurie Babin).

Why did Kelly-Anne hunt down the missing third tape?

Throughout Red Rooms, we see Kelly-Anne engaging in all sorts of sketchy, duplicitous acts as she uses her electronic prowess to scan the internet and dark web in search of the third and final tape. The one containing the horror inflicted upon the third victim, a girl named Camille. Two other tapes were already retrieved and one led to Chevalier's arrest.

But most disturbing of all is that Kelly-Anne already has access to the other two and has watched them, seemingly without feeling any real emotion for the poor little girls being brutally harmed on video. So when the film culminates in a climax that sees her using Bitcoin to bid on the third tape in a creepy auction setting, it's hard not to question her motives. Ultimately, she leaves a flash drive containing the tape for Camille's mother...after breaking into their house in the middle of the night and placing it on the bedside table.

While this decision does help put Chevalier behind bars, there's a sense that Kelly-Anne is not acting altruistically. Instead, she seems to get a rush or a high from "beating" the prosecution and by doing things she shouldn't be. The act of stalking and invading Camille's home is sinister enough, and the fact she watched all three tapes multiple times.

I think it really puts into perspective for the audience during the scene where Kelly-Anne shows Clementine the tapes. It's enough to rattle and disturb Clementine to the point where she gives up on the entire trial and, presumably, her idea that Chevalier was innocent. This is later confirmed when we see Clementine doing an interview at the end, adding that she was once one of the killer's "groupies" because she thought she saw something different in him.

What happens to Kelly-Anne?

We don't really find out what happens to her in the end. After leaving the tape for Camille's mother, she follows some of the news broadcasts, but it's also possible that she later got arrested.

After spending so much time on the dark web and later showing up in court dressed as one of the victims, Kelly-Anne procures a bad reputation, one that results in her likely being tracked by the FBI or police enforcement. She becomes incredibly paranoid, trashing her AI and taping off her cameras. It's hard to say where she'll go next, but likely Kelly-Anne will stay off the grid.

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