Pascal Plante's disturbing feature film set in Montreal sheds an unsettling light on compulsive behavior as two young women become a serial killer's "groupies" in court.

There is a sickening quality to the popular fascination with serial killers that goes far beyond a morbid curiosity about the crimes themselves — especially for those who can’t get enough of the subject matter. How many more dramatic accounts do we need of, say, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy? There’s no new insight to be gained. After a certain point, it becomes a pure, lurid fixation on real-life torture, rape, and murder. It’s grotesque that such high-profile monsters somehow become their own kind of entertainment franchise, constantly churning out new exploitations for a sizable, insatiable audience.

The French-language “Red Rooms” confronts that phenomenon in a disturbingly direct — if fictional — way, and Utopia opens in limited theaters in the U.S. this week, after a domestic release a year ago in Canada. Writer-director Pascal Plante’s third feature takes a disturbing focus on a “groupie” who is apparently attracted to a man accused of the gruesome deaths of kidnapped teenage girls.

Her total absorption in the case may have an unexpected motivation. Nevertheless, the coolly controlled film creates a kind of sick psychological atmosphere — one that hinges less on the mind of the accused than on the parasitic disease that causes viewers to obsess over his kind. Unlike most serial killer films, this one offers no glimpse of violence, let alone any wallowing in sadism. But somehow that makes it all the more sordid — at times the cringe factor is so great that you’d think no amount of showering could wash away a viewer’s stain by association.