A retelling of the 1978 ‘video nasty’ follows an online content moderator faced with steadily more appalling footage but reverts to generic bloodletting
Emerging amid the original 1970s home-rental boom, John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 film Faces of Death was an ultra-morbid extension of the so-called “mondo” genre. Mashing up gruesome footage – much of it faked, some of it legit enough to provoke ghoulish chatter – it achieved sleepover notoriety and then received a further publicity boost upon making the DPP’s “video nasty” list. What comes now, nearly half a century later, is less a reboot than postmodern rethink. Daniel Goldhaber, who broke through with 2022’s tense social-activism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has patched some of the original’s images into a more conventional digital-age horror narrative that initially resembles an American equivalent of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor: a film worrying away at what our ravenous eyes now consume and how good it can really be for us.
A thoroughly committed Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, a pill-popping content moderator sequestered within a tech firm’s faceless HQ, attaching appropriate warnings to user-generated footage. Off the clock, she’s dogged by memories (and viral footage) of a horrendous train-track trauma; her workload, meanwhile, gets even more challenging after repurposed Faces of Death clips creep on to her watchlist in pristine HD. Her supervisor (Jermaine Fowler) insists she should wave these through, as DIY horror is doing excellent numbers, but the situation intensifies once it becomes clear that a masked bad guy (Dacre Montgomery) is staging his own remake, involving real victims. More bodies drop, more pills are popped; and the project’s underlying intelligence, alas, begins to turn against itself.
The film’s stronger stretches gesture towards rigorous critique: consumers glued to bloodied screens, egging one another on, egged on in turn by conscience-free CEOs. This astute commentary has been packaged, however, within a bog-standard commercial horror format, easier to digest and forget about: straight-ahead kill scenes framed in Scream-like quotation marks, glib supporting characters mouthing dialogue such as “the internet … is fast”. Had he held his nerve, Goldhaber might have updated not just Faces of Death but 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, that unblinking indictment of video-age voyeurism. Instead – perhaps steered by producers keen to keep the TikTokers on side – he tips us reassuring winks, letting everyone off the hook. Whether real or fake, grim or goofy, everything gets flattened into content.
Faces of Death is on digital platforms from 7 September
