Faces of Death Review: Get Back in the Grave

If the word “Mondo” means little to you beyond the film merch company formerly owned by the Alamo Drafthouse, then you’ve probably been lucky enough to avoid the Faces of Death franchise, you sweet summer child. Mondo cinema was the name given to a subgenre of documentaries, spawned in the 1960s and assembled from the most disturbing and sickening clips, gussied up with some kind of pseudo-intellectual voice-over to cover their ghoulish intent. The most commercially successful and the nadir of the genre was 1978’s Faces of Death, a mix of actual newsreel footage and carefully staged gore filmed in faux vérité fashion. It was less a movie and more a dare. How much can you watch before puking or going, “Man, that’s so fake.”

The film spawned a series of sequels of decreasing value (if that’s possible) and now gains a meta-remake in Faces of Death, in which a bored cell phone vendor, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things, Dead Man’s Wire) kidnaps influencers in the Jacksonville area and uses them to re-enact the fake kills from the original movie for real.

There’d been talk of this kind of openly fictional riff on the series since back in 2006, when director J.T. Petty was attached to the project after the success of his pseudo-documentary, S&Man. That film was set in the world of underground extreme horror tape traders, but two decades later everyone can be exposed to such material through social media, whether they want it or not. It’s the job of Margot (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria, Bob Trevino Likes It) to stop the worst of the worst getting through: quite literally, as she’s a content moderator for social media watchdogsKino Moderation. When she starts finding Arthur’s scenes online, she has no idea about Faces of Death: Luckily, her queer artist roommate happens to have a copy on VHS that she can fast forward to watch the relevant gore and realize there’s a real killer on the loose.

As an examination of how content moderation inflicts incalculable psychological damage on the moderators, Faces of Death is little more than the idiot cousin to Uta Briesewitz’s agonizing and insightful American Sweatshop. As an online thriller about trying to bring an online killer to justice, it’s openly incompetent by contrast to Pascal Plante’s mournful masterpiece, Red Rooms. It packs less meditation about our fascination with real and realistic violence into 97 minutes than Tool managed in seven minutes of the similarly themed song “Vicarious” (“Eye on the TV/’Cos tragedy thrills me”) – and that had a lengthy guitar solo in it. Worst of all, Faces of Death completely fails even as sleazy entertainment.

Montgomery does his best as a Temu version of Tom Noonan’s eternally disturbing killer, Francis Dolarhyde in Manhunter, even if he’s inspired by TikTok rather than William Blake (director Daniel Goldhaber even steals the pantyhose-half-rolled-up-the-face look to ensure no one misses the homage). Yet he’s completely betrayed by the script’s decision to unmask him 20 minutes in and turn the story into a slow-moving cat-and-mouse chase with Margot. Sadly, Ferreira’s gurning performance simply confuses a furrowed brow with an inner life, which dooms the entire endeavor – not that it needed much help, or gives her any assistance. There’s no consistency to Margot’s character beyond idiocy, and a desperate attempt to create motivation for her through her own viral video is almost insulting. As for a dead-end cameo by Charli xcx, considering she could barely play herself in The Moment, hopefully this will finally be the time when she drops the “actor” part of singer-actor.

What’s most disappointing is that the script by Isa Mazzei and Goldhaber is the follow-up to their first and far superior film, Cam. That film, drawing from Mazzei’s own experiences as a cam girl, was highly effective in how it balanced its insights into online sex work culture with surreal horror. By contrast, their Faces of Death is dull and thoughtless, its attempts to smash influencer culture into voyeurism feeling artificial. Even its odd sharp observation, like how harmless videos about using Narcan correctly or putting a condom on a banana get deleted while workplace accidents stay online, is blunted by the clumsy filmmaking. Its attempts at moralizing are as forced as the moments in the original in which fake pathologist Francis B. Gröss (actually actor Michael Carr) rattles on about reincarnation. One can only hope that Faces of Death doesn’t come back from the grave.

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