For people in a certain age group, it’s going to feel jarring to learn this new movie is called Faces of Death. Many of us remember this as the name of a series of movies that made their way through the hands of teenagers and VHS players in the 1980s and ‘90s, movies that purported to show people dying in various gruesome ways before it was revealed, years later, that a whole lot of what was shown was staged.
Now, of course, you can turn on your computer and find whatever horrifying thing you want, if you know where to look. And this is where the new film jumps off—it’s instantly deeply unpleasant, as we’re shown brief snippets of people being hit by cars, explicit sex, and terrible accidents, and we quickly learn this is what our hero, Margot, is seeing as she works as a content moderator for a TikTok-like video hosting site. She rapidly evaluates each video and approves or denies it based on some sort of confusing criteria, and we wonder how in the world a person could look at this all day and not completely cave in emotionally and psychologically. And then, Margot sees something, a murder, and she starts to suspect it might be the real thing. What’s more, it turns out this is a reenactment of one of the scenes in the original Faces of Death movie, except this time, it’s for real.
And yes, that’s as dumb a premise as it sounds, a serial killer who copies scenes from Faces of Death, and we wonder why our villains have to be as creatively bankrupt as movie studios are these days. But good filmmakers can execute even a stupid idea well, and director Daniel Goldhaber and his co-writer Isa Mazzei are responsible both for this ridiculous concept and for ferrying us through it in a way that’s a whole lot more effective and interesting than it ought to be. As Margot zeroes in on the killer, we see how easily concerns about such awful things can be dismissed these days, and even if the film doesn’t interrogate these ideas as thoroughly as we might like and it completely ignores the onset of AI, it does at least give us food for thought. And our killer is just as steeped in the online swamps as anyone else, as we see him get mad at and respond to comments on his videos and waffle over whether to add one question mark or three after a sentence. (He settles on two.)
Goldhaber is fantastic at creating tension with his music and slow camera movements, even when he’s still using extremely worn horror tropes like the scary guy hiding in the corner with a mask on. And while the movie is constantly fighting with itself as it tries to rise above its core conceit, you can easily see how a worse filmmaker would’ve just turned this into pure forgettable schlock resting at the bottom of the bargain bin.
Faces of Death is in theaters.
