At a recent function someone’s kid asked if I had seen the video of Charlie Kirk’s death. Truthfully? Not a clip I’ve sought out, but who even gets the choice? Proliferation of snuff amongst even children illustrates how badly the worst of the web has breached containment. Grotesqueries have always traveled. 1978’s Faces of Death is a good example. A “mondo movie” composed of real and simulated fatalities, its infamy largely regulated to secret screenings, video nasty collections and file sharing sites. Now you barely need to scratch before stumbling upon media that bleeds. A new slasher film from Daniel Goldhaber, inspired by and sharing Faces of Death’s name, stabs at the grisly state of social media though rarely gets as nasty.
Margot Romero (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira) is a content moderator for a new short-video platform. While flagging posts for sex and violence is drudgery, it’s personal for Romero. Years prior a traumatic video of her went viral. She doesn’t want a world where others have to suffer the same. When a series of clips featuring what appear to be staged executions begin catching heat, it’s unclear if the ornately made reels are simulated or the legitimate article. Romero notices a pattern between the posts, missing persons and the original Faces of Death film, kicking off a campaign to discover who’s behind these macabre movies, unknowingly putting herself in the killer’s crosshairs.
Faces of Death is occupying quite a few lanes. It’s a cat and mouse chase, Dacre Montgomery’s fidgety, particular killer would fit right in with Will Graham’s casefiles. It’s a social farce, Romero’s constant horror comes in equal parts from the madman at large and the people surrounding her amused by all the bloodshed. Swerving between them, the film largely ends up a pop horror poking fun at social media, never quite as bleak as actually logging in to one.
Despite being set in a world where the mondo movies and fail compilations exist, there’s never much cross-examination between the two. Original mondo cinema was exploitation barely masquerading as anthropology. There’s definitely more to pick apart about the inherently exploitative nature of online content and the pervasive horrors that have spilled over since the LiveLeak era.
The interests of the film are strictly on the phones, the kind of hypocrisy inherent in platforms that get to decide what horrors are beneficial and which drug safety tutorials are illicit. It’s a world driven by clout, simple as, and like a wink from the screenwriters is a line that suggests the entire Faces of Death angle is mostly branding. Maybe something too curious would also be too depressing, but it is telling that the most I winced away was during footage from the original film. Plus I expected the gore game to go a lot bigger.
Goldhaber’s previous film was an adaptation of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, taking the controversial Verso Book and turning it into a less controversial popcorn thriller. The director seems interested in taking on challenging source materials more than doing anything challenging with them. Faces of Death isn’t as rich, interesting or walloping as Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, but Ferreira’s high energy and Montgomery’s loathsome creep makes it easy to share Margot’s determination to stop him. A fun slasher that constantly alludes to much scarier things.
