Jason J Hedrick
Taking its title directly from one of the most infamous video nasties in history—the 1978 faux-documentary and faux-snuff flick directed by death-sploitation peddler John Alan Schwartz—do not presuppose Daniel Goldhaber’s new film Faces of Death as a mere reboot of that most depraved series of shock-VHS flicks. The original Faces of Death (which spawned something like six sequels and a few rip-off versions) was a sort of revival of the Mondo Cane films, a bad taste strain of Italian exploitation cinema from the early 60’s. Purporting to contain real footage of actual deaths—electrocutions, beheadings, and firing line executions—the original Faces of Death became a VHS boogeyman for an entire generation growing up in the 80’s and 90’s. It was often a very particular sort of “friend” you knew who had access to such a tape…and you might not want to hang out with them too much afterward. Or maybe you were that friend. Either way, it was the kind of phenomenon that might not be possible today, given the current state of screen culture, and Daniel Goldhaber’s new Faces of Death has a keen grasp of that generational difference.
In an age where everyone’s attention seems to be living inside a box, Goldhaber’s Faces of Death opens inside of another type of box—a cubicle at the fictional media platform Kinoapp. There we meet Margot (Barbie Ferreira), a content moderator clicking away in an occasionally questionable manner at her job filtering out all the digital imagery not suitable for mass consumption. Goldhaber and collaborator/co-writer Isa Mazzei’s decision to center the film around the job of content moderation—perhaps the most chilling and Orwellian of all modern job titles—is a brilliant and provocative framework, and only the start of what makes Faces of Death so fascinating.
The opening passages of the film acclimate us to Margot’s work life as a sort of second-in-command at Kinoapp to her boss played by Jermaine Fowler (notably featured in another great movie of cubicles and workplace horrors, the Boots Riley debut Sorry To Bother You). Margot keeps encountering possible “snuff” vids in her work that involve a strange cohort of mannequins torturing and killing live human specimens but is unsure about the authenticity of the uploads. Via some covert research into the VHS collection of her horror fanatic roommate (played by Aaron Holiday who comically deems anything he’s watching “a classic!”), Margot discovers the original Faces of Death film and pieces together that the videos she’s encountering at work are the directorial output of a copycat killer, transforming the sequences of the original film’s staged deaths into real ones.
Why? Well, while one of the film’s flaws might be how it ultimately handles the motivation of the masked and red contact-lensed killer, the extent to which audiences will innately understand how screen culture by way of the “manosphere” moves humanity toward the worst of human expression will likely make its own kind of sense. It also helps that the copycat killer in the film, whose identity is revealed early on, is played with a perfect balance of menace, comedic chops, and grotesque, looks-maxing energy by Australian actor Dacre Montgomery. When Montgomery’s character Arthur is asked by one of his potential victims about his video work, his response is a perfectly blasé summation of that demographic’s current attitude toward media production and consumption: “Oh, you know. The zeitgeist.”
While Montgomery brings a lot to the role, the production design team deserves special note as they’ve created something distinct and memorable through the sparse visual elements of Faces of Death—the red masking tape, the expressionless white mask, and the mannequin-populated tableaus of the murders. In this aspect, Goldhaber and Mazzei are striking similar chords as the films of Jane Schoenbrun, from her debut We’re All Going To the World’s Fair (which would make a great double feature with Faces of Death) to her forthcoming film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which looks to be playing with slasher iconography in a similarly ecstatic visual fashion.
But Faces of Death and Shoenbrun’s films also mark a new commentary on the horror genre from within, with the most go-to critical comparison of Faces likely to be the Scream franchise. While it remains to be seen whether Goldhaber’s Faces of Death will generate a series as unkillable as the Scream films (or the original Faces of Death films, for that matter), that it’s arriving alongside the wide release of Scream 7 seems significant. By contrast, where Faces of Death is creating some fascinating reflections of the horror genre in a world flooded with daily online horrors, the Scream films continue to limp along in search of a relevance that entirely eludes them (honestly, I gave up after the Scream “re-quel” from 2022, and from the start never really found the series as game-changing as everyone else seemed to). Goldhaber and Mazzei are generating more than rehashed scares, and the crack storytelling skills on display in their excellent previous film How To Blow Up a Pipeline carry over entirely to Faces in Death.
What also makes Faces of Death a richer and more entertaining film than any entry in the Scream franchise is not just the story, but the more poetic play of the character and visual elements—and, yes, the very astute way it captures the zeitgeist. In 2014 Wired magazine published an article by Adrian Chen about content moderators called “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” which seemed like it deserved more attention than it got for detailing the fairly traumatic experience of those who labor as filters on the smokestacks of media platforms, relentlessly processing and passing judgement on the most vile content the internet has to offer. Faces of Death feels like one of the first films to take this exploitive labor practice seriously, and somewhat brilliantly compounds this idea by making Margot’s content moderator a sort of internet celebrity herself; a traumatized and self-medicating victim of an accidental snuff film that leaves her in a state of constantly being called out as the “train girl.”
Another resonant character aspect of the film comes from the casting of Charlie XCX as a trashy co-worker at Kinoapp who likes to have a laugh at the more horrific videos on her smoke breaks. In one scene Margot calls her out for laughing at one of the videos, to which she defensively replies: “I’m coping!” There’s a lot wrapped up in a moment like this—the fact that a pop star from a different stratosphere is playing a moderator, and that Charlie XCX is coming off an unsuccessful mockumentary about her own obsessively viewed pop stardom, but also the very blunt and confused reality of laughing at atrocity as a coping mechanism. A lot of movies have tried to critique and diagnose the anxious, media-saturated, post-pandemic generation, but Faces has a way of allowing a few perfectly placed choices like this to radiate meaning in a way that feels fresh.
Goldhaber and Mazzai understand how caught the culture is between violence and escapism, grim cubicles and pop obsession. They also understand the state of flux that cinema itself is in and meet it fully and intelligently from the perspective of a generation that has grown up entirely online. In fact, when Goldhaber and Mazzai began their research by viewing the original Faces of Death films they quickly realized they had seen some of the segments before, only not as a whole, but parceled out in clips and pieces. This mode of viewing is also a significant part of the violence the film is exploring—the violence of media fragmentation and juxtaposition.
And the film may not only be reaching back to 1970’s exploitation films for inspiration, but there also seemed to be a nod to Neil Postman’s 1980s media theory book Amusing Ourselves To Death and his concept of “And Now This…” culture where everything is flattened out by horrific news routinely being butted up against some fluff piece. For instance, in Faces of Death we go from news of the murders instantly to: “And now this…Yoko the puppy!” The film not only gets at the distance between the original Faces and today, but the incomprehensibly accelerated state of “And Now This…” culture and our inability to make moral sense of it, which the ending of the film seems to nail. Even Arthur’s “real” snuff films-within-the-film are quickly reduced and neutralized into meme form, just as with most cinema these days, which is cleverly marked in the film by the app carrying the name of “Kino.” Faces of Death is, perhaps, also about the death of “kino,” of movie culture as we know it, but it has enough intelligence and style to radiate some hope for reinvention.
