It’s a shame the “Scream” franchise has already bled out everywhere but the box office, because Daniel Goldhaber’s similarly meta “Faces of Death” is sharp enough to have cut that self-cannibalizing shibboleth down to size on its own. Much uglier and more pointed than Paramount’s stab-happy ATM of a movie franchise, this similarly meta reflection on media consumption — on the “rules” of the game, and our detached relationship to ubiquitous scenes of violence — exhumes one of the most notorious horror movies ever made in order to shudder at the banality that snuff films have come to assume in the age of social media. Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.
Consider how different things were back when John Alan Schwartz’s “Faces of Death” was first released in 1978. Enshrined in Goldhaber’s film as “the first viral video,” the cheap but extremely profitable faux-documentary — in which a fake pathologist by the name of Francis B. Gröss (lol) narrates a semi-convincing series of staged executions, presented to the audience for purportedly scientific reasons and interspersed with legitimate news footage in order to appear more credible by association — became the stuff of urban legend as rumor spread that everything in it was authentic. It was happily branded as a cursed object, and hidden among the porno tapes behind the beaded curtains at video stores across the country.
Today, video stores have virtually all gone out of business, and every teenager in America goes to school with a portal in their pocket that allows — or encourages — them to witness all of the world’s atrocities as they play out in real-time so that a small handful of tech giants can profit off that morbid attention. “Faces of Death” is no longer “banned in 46 countries” (as its exaggerated marketing once boasted), it’s now the world’s most lucrative business model. How do you scale that idea to its current extreme? It’s simple: Instead of goading people to wonder if something is “real,” you create an intangible social fabric in which everything feels equally fake.
Goldhaber’s “Faces of Death” is tense enough when it wants to be, eventually building to a fantastic cat-and-mouse sequence at the start of its third act, but this reimagination of its mondo horror namesake is less sustained by slow-building jolts than by the queasy thrill of mapping fear onto an economy in which attention has become more valuable than life itself (while the film contains three home invasion sequences that adhere to the logic of a classic slasher, even those are scary in spite of Goldhaber’s decision to privilege the killer’s POV). And poor Margot, freshly traumatized by her sister’s death in a viral video gone wrong, is just the right person to chart a meaningful course across the film’s script (co-written by Goldhaber and his usual collaborator Isa Mazzei, a former camgirl whose lived insight into the fragmentation of online identity feels as key to “CAM” and “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” as it does here).
Played by “Mile End Kicks” star and “Euphoria” standout Barbie Ferreira, who shrewdly portrays the kind of 21st century final girl who’s both dumb enough to dance on train tracks for likes and smart enough for us to believe that she might be able to survive a movie like this (social conditioning is a hell of a drug), Margot has just landed a new gig as a content moderator at a TikTok-inspired video app called “Kino” (lol again). Her job is to sit at her desk and stare at a never-ending stream of all the posts that have been flagged for removal from the platform, Goldhaber relishing the contrast between the “Backrooms”-like sterility of Margot’s office and the vivid awfulness of what she’s forced to watch for work. While Kino’s terms of service implore her to ban anything that feels even remotely adjacent to sexual content (i.e. girls can’t be in their underwear, but bikinis are okay if they’re near a swimming pool), the burden of proof is reversed when it comes to violence, as Margot is only allowed to censor even the bloodiest of dismemberment clips if she can unambiguously determine that they’re real.
No matter. A job’s a job, Margot is hurting, and cleaning up the internet — even if only to spare her corporate overlords from the nuisance of being sued — makes her feel like she’s repurposing her pain for good. Her sister died because Margot failed to respect that social content is still at the mercy of physical consequence, and so Margot has rededicated herself to helping Kino draw a clearer line between real life and what its users see on their phone screens. Enter her natural foil: a mobile phone store employee named Arthur who uses his company’s proprietary data to stalk and abduct the influencers he then executes in elaborate video posts that mimic the murders from “Faces of Death,” as the killer effectively uses that movie’s now-transparent artifice as a disguise for the reality of his own work (he’s played by “Stranger Things” actor Dacre Montgomery, horrifying as the Red Dragon of Reddit).
Margot sees through it to a certain extent, but the real trouble comes from convincing her boss that it matters. “Real or fake” is an outmoded binary in a world that only cares about the bottom line, and the conceptual horror of this “Faces of Death” is rooted in the sinister nature of a system which the moral valence of mass spectatorship has been delegated to companies whose profits require them to deny that mass spectatorship has any moral valence in the first place.
Here, “give the people what they want” become a credo shared by Kino managers and serial killers alike, and it’s to the credit of Goldhaber’s film that “Faces of Death” is able to satisfy on a basic, audience-forward level even as its concept has clear priority over the more visceral expectations of its genre. The gore is sparing but effective, the movie’s initially ambivalent approach to genre eventually gives way to the recognizable contours of a razor-cut thriller, and the villain remains deeply unnerving despite his addiction to kitsch; the script is never too high-concept for its own good, and there’s something all too believable about the scene where Arthur revels in the dopamine rush of the likes and follows that roll in after his latest post.
While certain aspects strain for logic in a way that can be hard to swallow (who keeps their Adderall in a loose plastic baggie?), and a very off-brand cameo from Charli XCX nods at internet culture in a way that the rest of this movie isn’t prepared to meaningfully exploit, “Faces of Death” only ever feels like it’s veering off-course during a third act that requires us to believe the whole world might recognize Margot from her tragic brush with viral fame. No one living in a post-Hawk Tuah world can deny the iconography of human memes, but Margot’s renown doesn’t square with the desensitization bred from scrolling through snuff videos just like the one in which her sister got flattened by a train, and the movie’s ultimate reliance on her recognizability distracts from the power of its greater verisimilitude (by contrast, there’s a great moment that all too credibly illustrates what might happen if a panicked and bloodied young person asked a samaritan for help).
Of course, “it doesn’t always feel real” isn’t the most damning critique of a movie that so viscerally laments how inconsequential the reality of video content has become — and is still increasingly becoming. Although “Faces of Death” was shot all the way back in 2023, its critique of our video ecosystem assumes an even greater urgency when seen in context of the AI takeover that followed. That’s quite a swing for a project that only exists on the strength of the zombie IP that it so cleverly reanimates, but as one character points out in the film’s most “Scream”-adjacent moment: “Remakes let you get away with murder.” This one, which isn’t a remake in any way but name, suggests that getting away with murder is the easy part. It’s getting anyone to give a shit that people are dying that’s hard.
Grade: B+
The Independent Film Company will release “Faces of Death” in theaters on Friday, April 10.
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