Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | Film | April 12, 2026
The original Faces of Death came out in 1978 and I still had to do more than surface level research in 2026 to try to understand it. The “stuffed behind a velvet curtain” horror anthology landed as a strange test for audiences forcing them to try to decipher what was real and decide the ethics of consuming it. Writer and director John Alan Schwartz crafted a bizarre collection of scenes using stock and produced footage to purport to show clips of real ways people died for an audience to voyeuristically devour. A handful of sequels and years of questions and controversy later, Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei have teamed up to launch a meta-sequel that trades in the VHS video nasty for a content moderated social media app.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira who is having quite a year) is a stellar content moderator with an iron stomach. Seemingly unfazed by the ruthless onslaught of reported video clips from in-world short video app, Kino, she blows through making her moderation decisions during work hours and brushes it off for quiet nights. But soon, some too-gory-to-be-fake videos make it into her rotation, and Margot becomes obsessed with discovering whether they’re performance art or real and need to be swept from the internet. Margot feels a responsibility to clean up the app after her video blunder turned tragic and became a shareable bite for internet consumption. No one buys into Margot’s paranoia, but a clever redditor points her to an old VHS tape that sets her off trying to find a killer who seems inspired by the frights from the film.
It’s impossible not to compare this to 2025’s American Sweatshop, another flick that followed a content moderator trying to solve a real murder and getting in too deep. And they both seem next in line after Kimi which was just behind Rear Window. Incidental voyeurism leading to a paranoid attempt to stop blood spilling takes unprepared leads on journeys through their own violent abilities. Then there’s that Faces of Death is a meta-sequel, in the vein of The Town That Dreaded Sundown or Wes Craven’s New Nightmare where the inspirational text exists within the world of the film. These are all things that make the premise of Goldhaber and Mazzei’s work incredibly clever, but it unfortunately lacks in the execution of its ideas.
There’s a tonal mismatch sewn into the movie that a focus on Ferreira cannot alleviate. Charli XCX’s misplaced appearance as a Heathers kind of cartoon nihilist doesn’t fit with the emotional center of Ferreira’s victimhood. The gory camp scenes and earnest approaches of Ferreira and Aaron Holliday as her roommate, Ryan, clash with whatever it is Dacre Montgomery is doing as the killer. Any lampoon of how we consume violence doesn’t feel elevated beyond what we saw in Untraceable which is nearly twenty years old. The strongest satire is when Margot sweeps by approving the most violent and sexual content but marks educational videos about safe sex and drug use for removal.
Mazzei and Goldhaber are an inspired choice to reimagine this story. The two collaborated previously for Cam, a surrealist tale that also dealt with violence being streamed on the internet. That film had so much more weight to its scenes about the treatment of “hysterical” women and how we brush off violence streamed to a live audience. Their sensibilities show up here in their stylistic approach, the snuff films being born of the 1978 original while holding onto their own grindhouse imagery.
Faces of Death is a weak showing from an exceptional writing/ directing duo though one that’ll not leave me, as an audience member, deterred. The meta-sequel reboot (whatever you wanna call it) is a fun idea, but by basking in the bright red blood splatter and not elevating its premise, it ends up being the very thing it’s purporting to have us question. Another violent tale for popcorn consumption without effective commentary ends up putting us all in the seats of the nasty redditors and I don’t think that’s the meta-story Faces of Death was trying to tell.
Faces of Death hit theaters April 10, 2026
