Is this face taken?
The biggest movie story going right now is youth slaying a giant. Two YouTubers barely out of their early twenties, Kane Parsons with Backrooms, Curry Barker with Obsession, have made horror pictures for modest budgets that are currently lapping Disney’s stumbling The Mandalorian and Grogu at the box office. They are a part of the first generation of filmmakers raised entirely in a social media world, where the algorithm and the memetic landscape condition us to crave something provocative and stirring before the last jolt even completes. You don’t need me to tell you that this current attention economy is a scary one.
Filmmakers have been circling this particular strain of dread for a few years now. Jane Schoenbrun keeps teasing out how we dissolve our personalities into our screens (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow). Pascal Plante’s extraordinary thriller Red Rooms, still the high-water mark, followed a woman down a dark-web rabbit hole and found no easy answers about the ways our souls are transforming in front of devices. Faces of Death splashes in similar waters. It takes the broad thematic ideas of Red Rooms, states them louder and more plainly, and bolts them onto a more conventional thriller chassis. It sounds mean to call it Stupid Red Rooms, but it is also honest.
The film follows Margot (Barbie Ferreira), who works as a content moderator for a TikTok stand-in called Kino, spending her days scrubbing the worst the internet produces. One day, she starts flagging clips that look less like gore gags or reposts and more like the genuine article: murders staged as scene-for-scene recreations of the controversial 1978 shocker Faces of Death. (The movie’s funniest joke is in the background: Kino’s rules wave graphic death right through moderation while deleting clips about safe sex or clean needles.) Rather than draw a whodunit, the film hands you the killer early: Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery), a mellow cell phone store clerk who data mines his potential victims. Before long, Faces of Death’s Clarice and Buffalo Bill are on a collision course.
Faces of Death is a success as a nuts-and-bolts horror-thriller. Director Daniel Goldhaber, best known before this for the engaging but sanded-down How to Blow Up a Pipeline, constructs a brutal story. Visually, he finds a provocative contrast between the sickly fluorescence of Margot’s open-plan office and the lurid dark of Arthur’s murder chamber. Gavin Brivik’s synth score thumps along with a retro-genre menace that’s both atmospherically perfect and flat-out well-composed. The craft is accomplished across the board: Goldhaber integrates screens (e.g. Reddit threads on laptops) into the story very smoothly (and plausibly), and he executes a one-take in the back half that’s a genuine showstopper. And, I must emphasize, it is scary and grisly without crossing into degrading nihilism. The suffering is rendered as nauseating as the themes demand, with none of the defanged, PG-13 flinch we might have expected if this had a wide release ten years ago.
Ferreira is the heart of the film, an excellent but slightly unusual presence. She carries the thriller material, especially an excruciating struggle in the climax, quite well. She also sells the bruised human underneath, somebody clawing through her own damaged, social media-ruined past trauma: Her sister’s death was caught during a live social media stream on a train track. Montgomery is good as the villain, too, all skin-crawling restraint with little glimmers of campy over-extension.
A few things keep me from going all the way in on Faces of Death. The first is that the third act works so hard to upend normal horror movie plotting that ends up circling back to a different kind of aggravating. Margot is written as one of the few people onscreen who genuinely grasps the danger afoot, yet she keeps making the exact dum-dum decisions Sidney Prescott once lodged her famous complaint about. That third act is also when the film decides to step on its soapbox and announce its themes a few times just in case it wasn’t clear that desensitization to violence and cruelty is a bad thing, and maybe we shouldn’t be cheering for the spectacle of murder like we’re watching Roman gladiators.
The connection to 1978 Faces of Death is oddly thin and underwhelming, too, and the quips about a “remake” are straight out of the worse Scream sequels. The thread about Arthur recreating the old movie feels more like a leftover from an earlier draft than a load-bearing thematic or narrative structure. Cut it and you’d lose almost nothing.
None of this sinks the film. It’s dark, biting, and brutal, and if it doesn’t bowl me over, it’s still an achievement: Horror-heads will devour it, and the merely curious will still find a fresh, gnarly thrill. Squint and you’ll catch a little Scream in its DNA, some found footage, a little Texas Chain Saw from further back, along with the blunter kinship with Red Rooms and other social media-centered horror flicks. So I’m sorry it landed with such a soft thud: its $7 million box office looks especially flimsy next to the year’s big horror success stories of Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung. A movie this provocative about the human compulsion to watch depraved thrills deserved a few more people who couldn’t stop watching it.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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