Evoking the infamous 1978 horror "documentary" Daniel Goldhaber's not-remake Faces of Death does something different: it finds parallels between that movie and today's online world, and it has something to say about them.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at Kino, a video-based social media platform, spending her days attempting to flag iffy content. She does this to atone for a horrible mistake that changed her life. She stumbles upon a series of murder videos that may be fake, but might also be real. Her boss (Jermaine Fowler) isn't concerned, saying that videos like that are popular and good for business.
Through her horror-fan roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday), she discovers that the videos are remakes from segments of the notorious 1978 movie Faces of Death, a "documentary" that claimed to show real deaths on camera. As Margot becomes more and more obsessed with finding the source of the videos, the killer (Dacre Montgomery) takes notice of her and decides to add her to his "cast."
The title Faces of Death may still have the power to shoot shock-waves in the brains of viewers, but co-writer and director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) isn't interested in exploiting it with more gore for gore's sake. Like last year's surprisingly good remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night, his movie has an entirely new angle.
The Sam character is shown as an everyday "influencer," who thinks about nothing but ways to get more clicks, more likes, more traffic, while our hero Margot has learned her lesson from that lifestyle (a video she once made went tragically sideways) and now seeks penance, trying to protect others through her work. Even the villain looks at life through a camera lens; ironically, while the blood flows in his videos, he is violently revulsed by it (he can't bear to touch it). Pop star Charli xcx plays one of Margot's co-workers who is so desensitized that the violent images that go by in a flurry barely affect her.
The movie comments on the rising popularity of the horror genre, but doesn't examine why. Rather, it focuses on the horror of not being able to tell the difference between real and fake. If fake horror is somehow therapeutic, then real horror is the opposite: causing trauma, as Margot well knows. The movie's formula cat-and-mouse chase doesn't really offer much to the equation — it feels a little too generic — but overall Faces of Death gets its commentary right on the nose.
