Director: Pascale Plante

Stars: Juliette Gariepy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

Shades of late 90s Canadian cinema at its most clinical and unsettling, a la Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, in this involving psychological horror. Gariepy is Kelly-Anne, a model who specialises in edgy photoshoots with a lucrative sideline in playing online poker. She is obsessed with the trial of a serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (McCabe-Lokos) and attends court every day to observe the impassive accused. Chevalier, it is revealed, tortured his young victims before murdering them and selling the ‘performance’ to the dark web. Kelly-Anne strikes up a perverse friendship with small town girl Clementine (Babin), a more traditional conspiracy theory-minded obsessive who sleeps rough and believes she understands the murderer. But as Kelly-Anne’s behaviour becomes more extreme, even Clementine becomes freaked out. Actor and model Gariepy is hypnotic and supremely creepy as Kelly-Anne, and Babin makes for an ideal innocent out-of-her-depth foil. Director Plante maintains a steady hand even as reality starts to unspool. The plotting keeps audiences guessing as to Kelly-Anne’s true motives right up until the final reel and the ending is very satisfying. Some content may be too extreme for some tastes though, with the piercing sound design especially unnerving.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm