Face your fears.
It was midway through Faces of Death II, a “film” that can only loosely be called a sequel to the original cult horror/quasi-snuff movie Faces of Death in the same way that a cheap faux death montage can only loosely be called a film, that I broke. I broke not because of the horrors supposedly contained therein, but because of how hilariously terrible it all was. As the pseudo-documentary showed brief clips of people being cremated, narration informed me that “it’s one thing to witness the cremation of the dead, but the horror of being burned alive is a truly agonizing face of death.” Later, the narration also explained that “hypothermia is probably one of the most painful ways to die” as, wouldn’t you know it, “during this process, you literally freeze to death.” And reader, let me tell you, only rarely have I laughed as hard at a movie, even outright comedies, as I did during these moments.
It’s this context that only makes it that much more impressive that Daniel Goldhaber’s new Faces of Death is an actually good film. As it turns out, a scrappy modern genre gem can be born from a film only notable for the mythology surrounding it. Goldhaber, again working with his co-writer and collaborator Isa Mazzei, with whom he previously wrote the slept-on 2018 horror film Cam, riffs on this mythology to wonderfully menacing and mirthful effect. Where other, far lesser, recent horror movies feel like they’re trapped in the shadows of what they’re attempting to build upon (looking at you The Strangers: Chapter 1, 2, and 3), this bold, bloody and biting new Faces of Death demonstrates how some of the best “remakes” can come from the films who are willing to poke fun at themselves and their past. Where the original Faces of Death proved to be little more than a woefully scattershot series of clips, this is one of the better, more creative horror reimaginings of recent memory.
Right out of the gate where we get to know Margot, played by the always great Barbie Ferreira, who works as a content moderator. She spends her days doing the mind-numbing task of reviewing video after video on a TikTok-esque platform, seeing everything from drunken fights to animal attacks and horrible car crashes. Though she carries with her a traumatic incident of her own, Margot has managed to find ways to navigate this grim job. However, when she comes across a series of potential snuff films that show what viewers and her boss believe to be staged killings, she’ll find herself going down a rabbit hole that reveals they may be deathly real and inspired by Faces of Death. While it’s funny to hear the original’s narration again, this time accompanying Isaac Bauman’s new cinematography, the videos look queasily and purposely artificial in a way that only makes the subsequent shift to “real” death that much more unsettling.
Goldhaber’s film isn’t the first to use the profession of being a content moderator as a way into a genre story, but it is the first that feels like it actually makes the most of this distinctly modern nightmare. Some of this comes from how effectively the film underplays so much of the darkness of the job, making it eerily acute how easily one can fall into numbness after seeing video after video of gruesome violence every day. But it’s when even this goes off the rails that Goldhaber cuts deepest into our present online-warped psychology.
The world we live in now is one where — despite most of us not seeking out murder videos — the goofy, grim mythology the original Faces of Death made for itself is all too ordinary. Violence and bloodshed await us in a constant feed that can be beamed from our pockets into our brains. It’s like we’re all stuck witnessing one, long, unbroken trainwreck on platforms that reward those making precisely more and more of whatever it is that will keep us forever glued to our screens.
The film is entertainingly tense in how it explores this, just as it is sharply pointed, becoming about the bloody lengths one will then go to maintain eyeballs in an attention economy where we all have become numb to nightmares. Yes, this ends up involving a terrifying serial killer, played by a never-better Dacre Montgomery, whose presence immediately kicks things up a higher gear when the film needs it to. However, there’s also something alarming in how, for all the ways he’s a psychopath, he’s not too dissimilar from Margot and all of us. He, too, was molded by the online spaces we’re all swimming in, which Goldhaber captures in a gut-busting joke involving him commenting on his own videos. He makes good on the darkly comical promise at the core of the film’s premise just as it becomes profoundly disquieting in a way that’s impossible to shake.
It’s not as propulsive as Goldhaber’s previous film, the urgent How To Blow Up a Pipeline, but it still comes away with a pound of flesh and then some. In particular, even as the story stumbles in getting there, the fantastic final confrontation the film builds to demands that we sit up and pay attention. This is the world we’ve built where the original Faces of Death now looks downright quaint by comparison. I again laughed at this new incarnation, but I also didn’t dare look away. ν
