The term “snuff film” used to have some wildly dark and mysterious associations, but it’s not a phrase that’s commonly used anymore. Nowadays, where you can find at least one gruesome or death-depicting video within minutes of scrolling on anyone’s app of choice, it seems our innate curiosity and fixation on death as humans has become more mainstream, even trendy. As true crime stories and horror movies hit the “Trending” page on every streaming service, it’s clear that this human fascination with death has transcended generations.
Coming from Daniel Goldhaber, who gave us the gripping activism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline back in 2022, it’s expected that this would be more than a traditional horror movie. By mixing intense and visceral slasher elements alongside “online extremism”, we get something rather unique with Faces of Death.
The semi-remake brings this morbid eagerness into the era of influencers and TikTok. Dubbed (ironically) as Kino in this universe, we accompany Margot (Barbie Ferreira) at her drone-like job with Kino’s content moderation department. The first thing we see are some of these videos Margot has to moderate through daily. Mindless injuries, stupidity, sexuality, and violence flood through her workspace, some of which I ashamedly even recognized.
It’s within just these first few moments that this atmosphere of dread sinks in. Margot’s consistently motivated clicks on the “Allow” button for strangely disturbing material comes almost to a point of comedy. It even makes a point of emphasis that content about sexual education and proper drug-use knowledge, such as condom or Narcan use, is immediately blocked from the site. It’s a pretty brutal routine, but one that gets interrupted when Margot finds content she thinks depicts an actual murder.
We eventually get to see the other side of this phenomenon from the creator’s perspective. Going by Arthur, this extreme individual (Dacre Montgomery) is a reflection of the dark parts of the internet. A man who seeks no pleasure in trivial matters but feels alive through his sickening online persona. Each response, positive or negative, to his callous death videos is a point of pride. Much like streamers who do or say controversial things as a way to drive in viewers and followers, Arthur uses brutal and inexplicable death to achieve the same goal.
Montgomery is the glue that holds this movie together. The film’s provocations on violence, complacency, and the banal evil of social media are strong, but wouldn’t resonate as well without the vicious and unpredictable nature he puts behind Arthur. Though I wouldn’t classify Faces of Death as particularly scary, Montgomery’s presence is the reason the tension remains at an anxious level.
But, as this falls into a more expected slasher style set-up in its latter half, I found myself missing the connection between violence and media that didn’t cling to the genre tropes it’s working so hard to deconstruct. With the former section finding a mysterious balance as a recreation of the original movie within a modern context and meta-contextualizing its relevance through remake culture, so much feels purposeful to help this idea marinate. It might not do this subtly, but it makes more of an impact than its dips into more conventional horror.
Even with its missteps, I’d still give Faces of Death a recommendation for any fans of slasher horror or those who enjoy how modern cinema continues to wrestle with societal violence. This appears to fall into a pattern this year with similar concepts shown in Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and recently with Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama. If anything, it shows our complacency with violence, examined through creative ways, can be quite effective.
As we continue to deal with brutality and aggression on a day-to-day basis, cinema can be a place to actually challenge us on our conceptions of violence and let us ruminate on how much it dictates our lives and our thoughts. I unfortunately feel Faces of Death may get lost in the shuffle by the end of the year, but anything that stops us and makes us look back at the world we’ve created for ourselves shouldn’t be easily dismissed.
