The Faces of Death remake understands what it wants to say about social media and violence, but doesn’t trust itself enough to say it cleanly.
The most shocking thing about the new Faces of Death is not its kills, but its expectations. Any “reimagining” of a cult film leads to low expectations for potentially muddling the message of its predecessor. The 1978 original is one of those movies that lives in the cultural consciousness as a kind of forbidden artifact — a VHS tape your older cousin supposedly had, whispered about but rarely actually watched. That legacy alone is a lot to carry into a modern multiplex, and this version carries it unevenly at best.
The setup is smart — a content moderator (Barbie Ferreira) for a TikTok-esque social media app starts noticing more and more gruesome videos as she scrolls through her company’s timeline. She tries to alert others, but isn’t taken seriously due to a rough past. But the videos keep coming, seemingly from the same unstable man (Dacre Montgomery) who kidnaps various people and keeps staging more gruesome killings.
The performances do the heavy lifting.
Ferreira is doing genuinely solid work here as the lead. She grounds the film when it threatens to go completely off the rails, and there’s a quiet authenticity to her performance that keeps you invested even when the script starts failing her. She’s not playing a horror movie protagonist in the traditional sense — no constant shrieking, no inexplicable decisions, at least not in the first two acts. She plays someone who is tired and traumatized and a little obsessed, and that specificity goes a long way. You believe her.
Photo Credit: Independent Film Company and Shudder
Montgomery, meanwhile, is leaning all the way into his post-Stranger Things chapter, and it largely works. He’s convincingly unhinged without chewing the scenery into oblivion — there’s a controlled stillness to him that’s actually more unsettling than if he’d gone full theatrical villain. It’s a performance that suggests he has some interesting career choices ahead of him if he keeps picking his spots carefully.
For shock’s sake.
What works: the film genuinely has something to say about social media and the way we’ve collectively numbed ourselves to extreme content online. It’s not the sharpest commentary you’ll ever see on the subject, but it pokes at something real. Using TikTok (or a facsimile of it in this case) as the entry point into this world is a clever choice, with Ferreira’s character as someone whose entire job is to absorb darkness on behalf of the rest of us so we don’t have to. We live in an era where people scroll past genuinely disturbing footage the same way they scroll past a recipe video or a dog doing something cute, and the film at least understands that’s worth examining. There’s a strong movie hiding somewhere in that premise, and you can feel it straining to get out in the film’s better moments.
Here’s the issue though: the film seems to think “graphic” and “bold” are the same word, and they are very much not. There’s a version of this story that earns its disturbing moments and uses them deliberately, sparingly, in service of the larger point it’s trying to make about our relationship with violent content. And then there’s what this movie actually does; reach for shock value as a substitute for the deeper dive it keeps gesturing toward but never quite commits to. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone yelling a point instead of making it. The irony is almost too on the nose: a film critiquing our desensitization to graphic content by throwing so much graphic content at you that you start to feel a little desensitized. Whether that’s intentional meta-commentary or just a lack of restraint is hard to tell, and I’m not sure the film could either.
Photo Credit: Independent Film Company and Shudder
The third act is where things really start to wobble. The buildup is patient and the tension is real, but when it comes time to pay everything off, the movie stumbles over its own feet in ways that are frustrating precisely because they feel avoidable. Decisions get made — by characters, by the screenplay — that undercut the dread that had been carefully constructed up to that point. It doesn’t completely collapse, but it deflates. You walk out feeling like you watched something that almost landed.
The bottom line.
Faces of Death is not a bad film. It’s an incomplete one — the kind that makes you wish someone had pushed back in the writer’s room a few more times before they locked picture. The bones are good. The performances are there. The idea is worth exploring. It just doesn’t fully trust itself to make the point without also making sure you know how serious it is about making the point, and that neediness makes the overall experience messier than any murder scene.
Faces of Death is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder. Read more articles by Alyshia Kelly here.
REVIEW RATING
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Faces of Death - 6/10
6/10
Alyshia is the Interviews Editor for InBetweenDrafts. A self-proclaimed pop culture enthusiast, she watches B-movies in her spare time and hopes to make one some day. Apart from writing, she is a publicist fully immersed in the world of entertainment.
