Faces of Death Review

In 1978, the horror exploitation film Faces of Death satisfied a perverse craving for modern audiences: the desire to see horror so shocking that it might actually be real. Presented as a documentary, the film blurred the border between fact and fiction, splicing together footage of death, violence and grim accidents with staged scenes designed to look disturbingly authentic.

Video nasties got a bad rap, and the culture blamed them for warping minds and turning impressionable people toward crime and depravity. Horror is always evolving, but the conversation around horror remains the same.

As special effects have become more sophisticated and filmmakers have found increasingly clever ways to make fictional violence look real, audiences have grown harder to impress. The internet has also contributed to this mass desensitisation. We don’t have to rely on scary banned videotapes to satisfy our curiosity anymore. Actual footage of death, shootings and extreme violence routinely populate our social media feeds and often become a part of the pop culture conversation and debate. Can seeing disturbing footage change us? Is it responsible for our actions?

With Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei take the original version and reshape it for the TikTok era. Their film follows Margot (Barbie Ferreira: Euphoria, Nope, Mile End Kicks), a content moderator for Kino, a hugely popular video-sharing platform. She spends her days scrolling through the platform, deciding which reported videos are too extreme or triggering to remain online.

When she isn’t online, Margot hides from her internet reputation. She has become an obscure internet celebrity, recognised by members of the public for a disturbing video that has earned her the nickname ‘train girl’. Margot retreats from her social life, keeping a distance from the online culture that has made her famous. However, when a chain of increasingly disturbing videos begins appearing on Kino, Margot is drawn back into the world she has been trying to escape.

The videos come from Arthur (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things, Dead Man’s Wire). He stalks and captures popular Kino creators and local celebrities, casting them in his very real restagings of moments from the original Faces of Death. Arthur’s motives are deliberately uncertain. He’s presented as both a killer and an artist. He selects his victims with purpose, suggesting that the murders are intended as a gruesome social commentary on the culture that obsesses them.

The film is fascinated by the strange gap between watching something because we are horrified by it and watching because our macabre curiosity urges us to see what happens next. The original film’s appeal was persuading viewers that what they’re seeing might be real. However, in this version the conversation has changed. With the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, modern audiences constantly question whether what they’re seeing is real. Goldhaber and Mazzei aren’t attempting a remake, and aren’t interested in fooling their audiences with sensation. Instead, they’re using the premise of the classic film to hold up a mirror to ask their audience why we keep watching.

The film is essentially a meta-horror film about watching Faces of Death. It is a film about a film. A film about the psychology of watching and looking. While there is a good central mystery at play, there are moments when the film seems desperate to make sure we understand what it is saying. Its commentary on online voyeurism and desensitisation isn’t subtle, and the film often trips over its own toes by overexplaining itself.

Yet, helmed by two incredibly strong performances and some genuinely nasty sequences, the film has plenty to enjoy. Goldhaber doesn’t use violence for violence’s sake; he seems genuinely interested in the psychology of horror. In his exploration of authenticity and realism within horror, he plants seeds of uncertainty. It makes for a very unsettling watch. One which mimics the original film, where we’re always anticipating the horror of what we might see next.

This unnerving atmosphere is upheld gloriously by Dacre Montgomery. With each on-screen outing, the actor becomes more and more interesting. Capturing our attention as Billy in Stranger Things, he has travelled across genres, showing incredible range. Here, he seizes the opportunity to take centre stage, embracing extremes few films dare to venture into. It’s really refreshing to see actors we’ve seen glimmers of promise from lead a film. Like Montgomery, Barbie Ferreira also takes her opportunity to show who she can be outside of a giant TV franchise. As Margot, she is frantic and messy, but she also embodies the morbid curiosity we all have within us. We gladly follow her into places we know we shouldn’t go.

The film doesn’t have anything world-changing to say. But it offers ideas that urge us to ask ourselves questions about the kind of things we see on the internet and whether those things are impressionable and bad, not only for our own minds, but for society’s collective consciousness.

Faces of Death is fresh, relatable and stuffed with blood and gore. It’s exactly what you want from a modern horror movie. It’s scary to watch, but it’s also pretty scary to think about, too.

★★★★

Available on VOD on 7th September / Barbie Ferreira, Darce Montgomery, Charli XCX, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday/ Dir:Daniel Goldhaber/ Signature Entertainment / 18