Faces of Death review – rework of notorious video nasty turns horror voyeurism into moral panic fable

Emerging amid the original 1970s home-rental boom, John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 film Faces of Death was an ultra-morbid extension of the so-called “mondo” genre. Mashing up gruesome footage – much of it faked, some of it legit enough to provoke ghoulish chatter – it achieved sleepover notoriety and then received a further publicity boost upon making the DPP’s “video nasty” list. What comes now, nearly half a century later, is less a reboot than postmodern rethink. Daniel Goldhaber, who broke through with 2022’s tense social-activism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has patched some of the original’s images into a more conventional digital-age horror narrative that initially resembles an American equivalent of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor: a film worrying away at what our ravenous eyes now consume and how good it can really be for us.

A thoroughly committed Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, a pill-popping content moderator sequestered within a tech firm’s faceless HQ, attaching appropriate warnings to user-generated footage. Off the clock, she’s dogged by memories (and viral footage) of a horrendous train-track trauma; her workload, meanwhile, gets even more challenging after repurposed Faces of Death clips creep on to her watchlist in pristine HD. Her supervisor (Jermaine Fowler) insists she should wave these through, as DIY horror is doing excellent numbers, but the situation intensifies once it becomes clear that a masked bad guy (Dacre Montgomery) is staging his own remake, involving real victims. More bodies drop, more pills are popped; and the project’s underlying intelligence, alas, begins to turn against itself.