★★★★☆
Grindhouse shock is swapped for platform-era paranoia in Faces Of Death: a punchy, good-for-her thriller for the doomscroll age.
In this year’s spin on the Faces of Death IP, Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei don’t remake the notorious 1978 mondo curio so much as exhume it, relocating the queasy fascination of “real” death to the world of content churn, feeds and moderation queues.
Barbie Ferreira’s content moderator, Margot, stumbles on snuff clips that restage the original’s set-pieces, and the film that follows is less about what’s on screen than what it means to watch it – tuned to the deadened scroll of online violence and the strange distance it opens up.
Anyone priming themselves for gnarly, dead-eyed bleakness should recalibrate: this isn’t in the torture-porn register of Saw or Hostel, dismembered corpses notwithstanding, but a TikTok-era spin on the 90s thriller, where tension builds through repetition and recognition rather than outright escalation. Ferreira anchors it, with Dacre Montgomery on antagonist duty and Charli XCX among the faces; Goldhaber, of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, again bends genre machinery to catch the nervous energy of the moment.
There’s even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Don’t Open Till Christmas, ranked bottom of a “cult films” listicle Margot scrolls past – as someone who once put that very film top of just such a list, I felt seen.
On the whole this is more XCX than XXX, and it wobbles at points, but as a crowd-pleasing, platform-age romp it goes gangbusters.
Faces of Death played at Tubi FrightFest in London.