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Faces Of Death (2026)
APRIL 6, 2026
GENRE: SERIAL KILLER, TECHNOLOGY
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PREMIERE SCREENING)
Lots of movies feel dated due to changing attitudes, or focusing on technology that was almost outdated by the time the movie came out, let alone decades later (The Net is a real laugh riot now). But the original Faces of Death is an unusual example in that it’s dated simply because its “appeal” (for lack of a better word) has since been outpaced by our everyday life. Sure, in 1978 and for the first few years of VHS supremacy, the idea of watching an alleged snuff film carried a certain taboo thrill, but now we get people live streaming their murders and/or suicides, sometimes seeing these things without even looking for them thanks to autoplay and “suggested” reels on social media.
So on one hand, on paper it’s the exact kind of movie that should be remade, because the original almost feels pointless now (that it’s a somewhat boring movie is another benefit; I DARE someone to come out and say that they’re “violating my childhood!” or whatever). On the other hand, how can this new Faces of Death possibly compete with what we see on any given day when scrolling through Twitter?
The relatively genius answer from the team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei is to take things into a meta direction. Our hero Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at some kind of TikTok-like social media channel as a content moderator, occasionally flagging things that are too extreme while allowing pretty much most others to get through. (In what I assume is a joke about America’s puritan ways, she is fine with pretty much every violent video she comes across, but when she sees a clip of a woman demonstrating how to put a condom on by using a banana, she flags it as “sexually graphic.”) One day she sees a clip of a man being executed in the electric chair and is somewhat unsure if it’s real or not, tentatively allowing it to go through. Then the next day, she sees another one that’s seemingly even MORE realistic, and starts getting concerned.
Eventually she breaks a work rule and reposts one of the clips on Reddit, asking the forum if they think it’s real or not, and someone points out that it "looks like a scene in Faces of Death." She can’t find it on streaming (A+ joke that was probably true when the movie was shot three years ago; it's on Roku and Amazon now) but luckily her roommate has a VHS copy and she checks it out, coming to the conclusion that YES these videos are legitimately snuff films and the culprit is intentionally restaging scenes from the original movie. But the movie is actually a two-hander, because rather than treat this as some kind of 8MM-style mystery, we spend half our runtime with the actual killer, played by Dacre Montgomery (Billy (RIP) from Stranger Things). He’s a tech whiz who can find someone’s location in seconds and goes after pseudo-celebrities (an influencer, a TV news host, etc) as the unwilling actors in his recreations, and naturally gets alarmed when Margot figures out what he’s up to and posts about it, tries to get the cops to help, etc.
I know that’s more of a summary than I usually bother with here, but I want to make sure it’s clear that unlike the original, this is a traditional thriller with suspense and cat and mouse sequences and all that good stuff, not a series of random clips like the original. Some might cry foul that making what essentially amounts to a modern-day, tech driven Seven-type thriller is a waste of the branding (no one will “dare” you to watch this, in other words), but as I have zero affinity for the IP I just took it as a perfectly decent serial killer thriller with a few good jokes at the expense of influencer culture. The movie could have been titled anything (it was shot under the title Home Movies) and just used the original film as a point of reference in the same way that Scream used Halloween or Prom Night or whatever.
Another smart move was to have the killer drug and kidnap his victims to bring them back to his home / “studio” for his recreations (which are otherwise populated with mannequins , a creepy visual). This allows Margot a chance to save some of them as he gets everything ready for the next video, giving the movie more suspense than it might have if it was just a series of straightforward killings. At one point he DOES kill someone instantly and it was actually a bit of a shock, as so far he hadn’t been so direct and it stood to reason that he wouldn’t bother anyone that wasn’t going to be the star of one of his clips.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not some minor masterpiece or anything. It gets a bit draggy at times despite a mere 95 min runtime, and there’s a brief turn from Charlie XCX that exists only for the producers to say that Charlie XCX is in the movie, which is the sort of thing that tends to annoy me (especially given the occasional flab in the runtime; both of her scenes could be deleted entirely without a single effect on the rest of the movie). And there’s a tragic backstory for Margot that rings false; she herself was inadvertently in a viral video in which her “co-star” was killed, but is mocked in public for it as if she was the “Boom Goes the Dynamite” guy or something. And when we learn this bit of history, her actions at her job make less sense to me - you’d think she’d be flagging pretty much everything as too graphic, instead of being so lenient on other violent images.
But again, the original isn’t something I hold dear, and I was worried a modern one would attempt to “top” it in some way, so using it as a springboard for something a little more involving (if not particularly groundbreaking) was a relief. I should also note that I had a little bit of personal attachment to the concept that I wouldn’t have gotten if I just watched the movie on streaming or even a day later. As I was walking from the parking garage to the theater, I saw a police car barreling down the street and suddenly swerve into a gas station where I had just been walking not 15 seconds before. The cops got out of the car, guns drawn, screaming at someone to get down, as two other officers (also guns drawn) made their way around the building from the other side to join them.
I couldn’t see the suspect from where I was now standing, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder if I should pull out my cell phone and start filming in case they ended up opening fire (from my position, they’d have to be wildly terrible shots for me to be in any danger from them OR whoever they were about to arrest. Luckily, the suspect surrendered without a shot fired and I just continued on my way to the theater, but it was that very “dare you to watch” kind of thing that drove interest in the original, and (not a spoiler, it’s in the trailer) gave the killer his motive in this new take. I was almost part of the problem!
(Alas, as is almost always the case, I can’t find anything online about the incident. If someone savvier than me wants to look, it was at about 615pm on Monday, April 6, at the VP Racing Fuels gas station at Hollywood & Highland.)
So, I dunno. YMMV. A friend said it was the worst movie he’s seen in over a decade, so clearly it’s not a universal crowd pleaser. And even though I enjoyed it, I can’t say for sure I’d ever watch it again, though I’d probably check out a commentary if offered (the filmmakers were there for Q&A and were worth listening to; they also made CAM, if you liked that one). But for a movie that’s been on the shelf for almost three years and was (technically) a remake of a film I considered a complete waste of my time, that it was even watchable is kind of a minor miracle. That it held my attention and made me chuckle a few times at the expense of influencers (I also liked the score a lot, reminded me of Rob’s for Maniac) is a win, in my book.
What say you?
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