In the age of virality, who will remember the snuff film? 1978’s Faces of Death, a documentary-style gorefest, is the stuff of dorm-room legend. “They show people dying for real,” your roommate might say as he hands you a dirty bong and fires up his ancient VHS player. John Alan Schwartz’s macabre mondo movie has endured through generations of unwashed edgelords off the strength of its proximity to taboo. Its violence is nauseatingly realistic: aristocrats eat monkey brains, prisoners die in executions, seals are clubbed to death, all under the implication of found footage. That most of Faces of Death is doctored or fake has done little to hobble its legacy. But when all the world’s horrors are an Instagram story away, grainy footage of manipulated death loses a bit of shock value.
Remaking a snuff film for audiences too young to remember rotten.com feels like a tall order. But, at least in a pitch meeting, Daniel Goldhaber seemed up for the challenge. The How to Blow Up a Pipeline director arms his remake with a brilliantly clever premise: a deranged killer named Arthur (Dacre Montgomery) recreates scenes from the original Faces of Death — this time, with real victims — and uploads them for his own viral fame. At first, the public seems to laugh them off. They’re probably not real, right? At any rate, they’re kind of funny. But Margot (Barbie Ferreira), a content moderator for a TikTok equivalent (called “Kino,” lol), smells a rat. In a world desensitized by the Internet’s atrocity exhibitions, it’s up to Margot to track down the killer and stop him from claiming more victims.
Faces of Death’s meaty, meta-forward conceit is a formidable concept that loses its flavor in execution. Margot clicks through horror after horror at her day job with the disaffected malaise of the screen generation. The movie’s social commentary is equally dead-eyed: a how-to video on life-saving doses of Narcan gets flagged (drug content), a clip demonstrating proper condom use is yanked (sex), footage of a man getting his head caved in with hammers gets a pass (America, baby). Western society’s contradictory boundaries of taboo around sex and violence is well-trodden territory, studied and lampooned by sources high and low from method-based research to the Family Guy theme song. Faces of Death has little to add to the conversation beyond trite observation. When Margot raises her concerns to her boss (Jermaine Fowler), he shrugs it off. After all, “the algorithm loves it, right?”
That brand of cynicism proves as metatextual as Faces of Death’s premise. As Arthur, Dacre Montgomery struggles to hit his marks as a composite of the slasher villains that paved his way. He sports the smooth-skinned germophobia of Patrick Bateman, the aw-shucks nerdiness of Evan Peters’ Dahmer, and a bit of Buffalo Bill sprinkled in for good measure. Faces of Death’s self-reflexivity lends solid precedent for a referential villain, but Arthur’s execution feels less like paying homage than someone feeling his way through the dark toward a substantive character.
There’s little of Montgomery’s performance that bears menace, and aside from a thrilling sequence that finds Arthur reeling in an escaped victim with a bolt-action rifle, his kills fail to bottle the live-wire awe of their source material. But most egregious is Arthur’s M.O. In a perfunctory speech to Ferreira’s final girl, Arthur limps his way through a diluted rehash of Scream’s theses on violence in media, its paintjob still wet from a reskin for the TikTok era. It’s a peroration as muddled and listless as the franchise’s modern entries.
If you peel back Faces of Death’s heavy-meta cultural commentaries, you’re left with a procedural slasher that breaks a sweat as it edges toward competency. Margot’s job as a content moderator is no accident. She has her own sordid history with a tragic video that went viral, and the pursuant baggage means when she’s not at work, she’s completely unplugged: flip phone, no social media, a black sheep among her Gen Z peers. So, when it comes time to track down Arthur, she’s stuck behind a dusty laptop, outsourcing much of the detective work to Redditors. It’s a clunky, circuitous route for a movie so concerned about Being Online, and the amount of film burned on typing and clicking and googling reveals tufts of gray hairs on Faces of Death’s bloody scalp. Barbie Ferreira is the movie’s strongest asset, admirably selling the brash naïvete that makes horror victims so magnetic even when you’re yelling at them to get out while they’re still alive. It’s frustrating that so much of her screen time is relegated to paperwork.
The original Faces of Death doesn’t boast much artistry, and it’s hard to imagine even its most diehard fans feeling too precious about its legacy — once you send the dork from down the hall running back to his dorm room, the tape has done its job. But a remake of a movie notorious for its hunger for taboo should bear some sense of transgression. Goldhaber’s take gets so dizzy within its own metafiction that it often forgets what made the original enticing in the first place. So much has been said about what it means to live with a portal to unspeakable images in our pockets, but few, including Goldhaber, have managed to communicate how it feels. Instead, Faces of Death spends so much time bumping into the walls of its own maze that the only shock it’s able to offer is its watering down of a snuff film into another piece of IP.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Goldhaber; CAST: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Charli xcx, Jermaine Fowler ; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: April 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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