By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery and Josie Totah
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
Written by Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber
Independent Film Company/Shudder
When FACES OF DEATH was first released in 1978, and more significantly arrived on video several years later, it wasn’t the first movie to showcase the shocking and forbidden in the guise of documentary exploration, but it was the most direct in its appeal to morbid curiosity. Distilling mondo movies down to their basest attraction, and echoing the notorious 1976 shocker SNUFF, it simply asked, “Want to see people actually die?” Of course, just as in SNUFF, its gory human atrocities were faked, but it’s arguable that just the act of seeking out the forbidden, venturing to the video store and sneaking the tape home, was just as enticing as the specifics of what you’d be watching.
Today, of course, anyone can sit down at a desktop or laptop and call up all manner of beyond-the-pale material with the click of a mouse or touchpad. The normalization of the consumption of the dreadful is certainly a pertinent theme for a modern horror movie—one that the new feature-film spinoff of FACES OF DEATH only goes partway toward exploring.
Certainly, this project was put into the right hands: Filmmakers Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei had previously plumbed the dark side of the Internet with perception and tension, along with sympathy, in 2018’s CAM. This time, their protagonist has a more passive than active engagement with the cyber world, at least at first. Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) works as a content moderator for the Kino video-hosting website, where she makes quick decisions about whether to pass or flag the clips that fly onto the platform at a dizzying rate. Goldhaber and Mazzei make their first comment about the new permissiveness early, as Margot allows all manner of violent images through while blocking instructionals about condom (on a banana) and Narcan use for sexual and drug content.
Margot remains detached from all this stuff, as do her co-workers and her boss, Josh (Jermaine Fowler). Even when she starts coming across a series of murder videos that appear alarmingly real, he brushes aside her concerns. “Do we look like the morality police?” he asks, summing up the attitude—or rationalization—behind any number of purveyors of questionable entertainment. But Margot, who has a gradually revealed personal history with on-line tragedy, persists in believing that these setpieces, in which the “killers” are mannequins but the victims are very much alive but not for long, are genuine. She begins a personal investigation and discovers, with the help of her horror-fan roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday), that the demises are being modeled on those from the first FACES OF DEATH tape.
Although her part of this story is a procedural, the new FACES OF DEATH isn’t a mystery, since the filmmakers introduce us to their villain early on. Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery), on the surface an unassuming wireless-service employee, is in fact a cunning serial killer who uses that on-line access to stalk his targets, who are all minor celebrities on various media. He abducts them, cages them in the basement of his expansive house and recreates the FACES OF deaths with them, posting his crimes on-line.
Given that these videos are on a popular site, the victims are at least semi-recognizable public figures and that Arthur tags his posts #FOD2024, it’s a bit of a stretch that Margot and a few Reddit randos are the only ones to put the pieces together and suspect foul play tied to FACES. Her suspicions, of course, are dismissed by Ryan and the police, leaving Margot to ferret out the culprit herself. At the same time, Arthur realizes someone is on to him, and one of the best scenes employs a split screen to show the two simultaneously tracking each other. Here and elsewhere, Goldhaber and Mazzei make brief, salient points about vulnerability and exploitation in the Internet age, and its capacity to bring out and encourage our worst impulses. Yet this movie doesn’t go as deep as CAM did, and loses that promising focus as it concentrates on the convergence of Margot and Arthur’s paths and the grisly, grotty developments once they meet.
As such, FACES OF DEATH 2026 does maintain a certain level of suspense and atmosphere, accentuated by Isaac Bauman’s stark 35mm cinematography and a very Rob-esque synthesizer score by Gavin Brivik. Ferreira and Montgomery are both very good, the former making you believe in Margot’s determination while the latter well conveys Arthur’s many layers of mania. Her decisions are occasionally questionable, and he’s eventually given to SCREAM-esque overexplanation of his motives, but the pair succeed in holding our attention through to the gruesome end, even as the emphasis on the cruelty they personally experience and inflict ultimately overwhelms the dissection of our collective fascination with violence and death.
