Faces of Death, a reimagining of the mondo horror cult staple of the same name, is a mean throwback to graphic late-1990s crime thrillers like 8MM, Se7en, and American Psycho. While its story and themes align nicely with its namesake, the real exploitation it evokes is that of nasty, turn-of-the-millennium titles dressed up as societally acceptable thrillers and dramas. From filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei, the team behind the breakout thriller Cam, Faces of Death is a sick, successful, and satisfying reboot intent on exposing on the grime, stench, and stickiness surrounding the violence of voyeurism.
There’s a quality to the film’s gruesomeness that actually feels dangerous, like when our algorithms cross the proverbial line, or when morbid curiosity gets the better of us after a political slaying dominates headlines alongside its circulating footage. There’s a mundane realism to much of the nastiness here, and that’s often the most perverse and shocking kind of violence there is. Because that’s the real stuff. Not necessarily because it looks real (it often looks less real, a theme the film explores), but because real death and suffering have become so ubiquitous in media that it can be hard to flinch at the sight or report of it anymore. By no choice of our own, we’ve become desensitized to atrocity. Not until it gets too close to home, and sometimes, in that case, it’s already too late.
Part of the brilliance of the film is how it manages to find an urgent and unshakeably relevant modern access point for its story. Barbie Ferreira’s character, Margot, is a content moderator for a Meta-adjacent platform whose job is to scroll through an endless cesspool of flagged, user-shared content to determine if it’s fit for the internet. This is still a very real job, and one that has made headlines over the last decade for extreme burnout rates, traumatized workers, and inhumane expectations of staff. The videos and content are often shocking beyond imagination and can lead to long-term psychological harm. This is our pivotal new Faces of Death access point. And it’s how we meet our genre’s latest noteworthy final girl.
Margot is a protagonist so messy, emotionally dysregulated, and self-destructive that it’s sometimes hard to gauge whether the filmmakers are always working with intention, or if the character might just be blundering menance. But when her full history and emotional context are revealed, it’s clear that her bull-in-a-china-shop behavior is well earned. Ferreira delivers one of the film’s two show-stopping performances. While there was chatter a few years back about Longlegs being positioned as a modern The Silence of the Lambs, with its central performance touted as a millennial Clarice Starling, those comparisons never landed for me. Ferreira’s clumsy, nothing-to-lose audacity as Margot feels much closer to what an authentically rendered modern-day Clarice archetype looks like. Of course, that wouldn’t be possible without a sinister and expertly frightening nemesis. Speaking of…
Dacre Montgomery’s turn as antagonist Arthur is a genre performance for the books. It’s hard to imagine many of his fellow A-List peers taking the same level of risks or swings that he does with the role, and it pays off in spades. A serial killer with a penchant for crafting DIY, social-first cinema, Arthur is a bloodthirsty and extremely cruel monster who stalks, abducts, cages, and brutalizes his victims with tight precision. While the character’s objectives are, on the page, a little shaky and familiar, it’s Montgomery’s jaw-dropping performance that elevates the role. You feel his passion and the joy his grotesque creative work brings him. And although Arthur sports some inventive costume iconography, he is maskless for the majority of his time on screen and far scarier for it. While Montgomery has proven his genre credibility with his star turn in Stranger Things and his success handling ghostly prestige with Went Up the Hill, but it’s in Faces of Death where he fully unleashes his freak flag and delivers one of the most impressive horror performances of the year. This is Oscar-caliber stuff, to be honest.
Ugly, mean, and difficult to watch, Faces of Death is a brilliant modern take on a franchise that’s always capitalized on all of our natural morbid curiosities. Yet in a brand new era where real-world atrocities, violence, and death are endlessly circulated, commodified, and consumed with easy access, Goldhaber and Mazzei’s update on the bottom-shelf horror franchise can be flagged as content that’s both dangerous and urgent.
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