A digital-age Faces of Death that swaps grindhouse shock for platform-era paranoia, landing as a punchy, crowd-pleasing good-for-her thriller.
★★★½
The original Faces of Death was less a film than a dare. Presented as a documentary, it stitched together staged sequences and real footage to suggest you were watching genuine death on screen, an urban legend object that circulated on VHS with a reputation far more potent than the material itself. It was, in effect, a pre-internet viral video, passed around in whispers and half-seen fragments. Which makes this new Faces of Death such an odd proposition: a meta-reimagining of something that barely had a narrative to begin with, shot in 2023 and then left sitting for a while before finally finding its way into cinemas.
Set in the world of content churn, feeds and moderation queues, and the “attention economy”, the 2026 Faces of Death updates one of exploitation cinema’s most infamous titles into something recognisably modern. This is less about what’s on screen than what it means to watch it, a film tuned to the deadened scroll of online violence and the strange distance it creates, all wrapped up in a fun little thriller.
Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, a content moderator who begins flagging a series of videos that seem to recreate deaths from the original Faces of Death tapes. As the clips escalate, the question shifts from whether they’re real to who is making them, and why they’re circulating. Dacre Montgomery is the straight-from-central-casting psycho behind it all, and Josie Totah his next victim. Charli XCX also pops up in a peripheral coworker role, adding little to the plot but reminding us of the film’s interest in performance, persona, and spectatorship.
There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Don’t Open Till Christmas, as the first, lowest-ranked entry on a “cult films” listicle she scrolls through while investigating Faces of Death. As someone who once put Don’t Open Till Christmas first in just such a listicle, I felt very seen and validated.
The Faces of Death title might prime you for something nastier, all gnarly gore and dead-eyed bleakness, but make no mistake – this isn’t operating in the torture-porn register of Saw or Hostel. It’s lighter than that, relatively speaking (it does feature plenty of dismembered corpses), and closer to a TikTok-culture spin on the 90s thriller, where tension builds through repetition and recognition rather than outright escalation.
Taken for what it is, it’s good fun. The punch-the-air moments landed, my crowd was cheering along, and the film knows how to ride that energy just long enough. It also makes good use of non-obvious New Orleans locations. Focus on what the film actually is (another entry in the good-for-her cinematic universe), not what some people thought it was going to be, and it plays as a sharp, entertaining romp.
Faces of Death played at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans.
Whitlock&Pope 