An online content moderator discovers a killer re-enacting the footage from the 1978 film. But is it real this time?
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Daniel Goldhaber
Starring: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX
The 1978 mondo movie Faces of Death purported to show footage of real life violence and death. None of it was actually real though, and it feels awfully quaint in today's world where you can easily find real footage of atrocities on social media, often when you're not even looking for it. Daniel Goldhaber's Faces of Death is an original thriller that conducts a meta conversation with its predecessor, imagining a killer who is so obsessed with the cult '70s flick that he recreates its grisly scenes, but this time for real.
The initial setup is identical to that of the recent Lili Reinhart vehicle Clickbait (aka American Sweatshop). Like Reinhart's character in that movie, Barbie Ferreira's Margot works as a content moderator for an online video-sharing platform. Her job is to wade through hours of disturbing footage and decide what's allowed on the platform. As such, Margot sees a lot of messed up stuff, but she is particularly disturbed by a series of videos depicting what appears to be real murders. Her boss (Jermaine Fowler) insists that it's fake, but when Margot notes that one of the victims is a missing filmmaker she becomes determined to find out if what she's seen is real or artificial.
Where Clickbait left that question open, Faces of Death makes it immediately clear that the footage is indeed very real. It is the work of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), a loner who abducts semi-famous people and forces them to "star" in his recreations of vignettes from the '78 shockumentary. In what feels like a nod to both William Lustig's Maniac and Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, the supporting "characters" in Arthur's productions are played by mannequins.
Goldhaber's film often resembles a product of the slasher era of the late '70s and '80s. It has a neon gaudiness reminiscent of a low budget take on Michael Mann's Manhunter. During his abductions, Arthur dons a plain white face mask that gives him the appearance of Michael Myers, sometimes donning a stocking mask like Manhunter's Dolarhyde. The movie's most thrilling moments are those that follow Arthur as he executes his nefarious plans, Goldhaber making great use of clever framing, empty space and the shadowy lighting that conceals all of Arthur save for that white mask. Ironically, unlike the original Faces of Death, which was desperate to convince us of its reality, Goldhaber's film leans heavily into cinematic artifice; we are never not aware that we are watching a movie, so stylised is this Faces of Death.
Played with sympathetic vulnerability by Ferreira, Margot makes for a compelling mix of unwitting final girl and proactive sleuth. Margot has become internet famous herself, thanks to leaked footage of her younger sister dying when an online prank involving an oncoming train went fatally wrong. Margot tells herself that she has taken her current job to help prevent similar footage from reaching the public, but there is room to wonder if she doesn't still harbour an unhealthy fascination with the thin veil between life and death. Montgomery is suitably creepy as the antagonist, and Arthur's ability to track down his would-be victims using various internet tools will have viewers investing in a VPN.
Faces of Death is quite riveting, that is until the point when Margot and Arthur inevitably intersect. The final act stretches our suspension of disbelief so much that it sullies a lot of the good work Goldhaber has done to get us invested up to that point. It's not a surprise that the filmmaker behind How to Blow Up a Pipeline doesn't have much respect for the authorities, but the depiction of institutional indifference here goes too far and is all too convenient for the film's plot. Margot is a very believable character until she stops behaving like a regular human being in the climax, needlessly placing herself in danger. The movie also breaks the unspoken storytelling rule that Chekhov's gun can only be fired once. The "gun" in this case is a prop that would be more fitting in a James Bond movie, and that Margot uses it not once but twice to conveniently get out of trouble is just lazy writing. Perhaps what's most surprising about Faces of Death's misfiring climax is how it spurns the opportunity to echo one of the original's most infamous sequences involving a SWAT team execution, when all the parts are set in place for it to do so.
Faces of Death is on UK/ROI VOD from September 7th.
