A woman, employed as a website content moderator, comes across a series of violent videos reproducing death scenes from a film.
Chuck says:
The end of the awards season to the beginning of May is usually a fallow time for moviegoers. Studios inexplicably treat this period as a dumping ground for films they have little faith in and others they must release due to contractual requirements. To be sure, not everything put out is a dog, “Project: Hail Mary” and “The Drama,” being recent examples of solid spring season movies.
What’s odd is that I cannot remember a period in which so many horror films have been released in such a short span of time as has been the case over the last six weeks. “The Bride,” “Forbidden Fruits,” “Hunting Matthew Nichols,” “Ready or Not 2,” “Scream 7,” “Slanted,” “They Will Kill You,” and “Undertone,” have tripped on the heels of one another, each attempting to get at least one solid weekend at the box office out of genre fans. With the exception of “Ready 2 and “Scream 7,” they’ve floundered, the former actually being worth the audiences’ time, as were “Slanted” and “Undertone.”
As Ben Franklin one said, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” and while I am a fan of the genre, sitting through each of these in such quick succession has taken a toll. And just when I thought I’d experienced the worst modern horror “filmmakers” have to offer, along comes “Faces of Death.” This is a vile piece of work that cloaks itself in “social relevance” before revealing itself to be an obscene, exploitation movie, the kind of which it is supposedly criticizing.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira) is a troubled young woman employed in a position she has no business doing. Having gained social media infamy by participating in a stunt that left her sister dead, the video of which went viral, she’s gotten a job at, of all places, a social media platform. All day, she looks at content that’s been posted, flagging anything that seems inappropriate.
Amongst the parade of disturbing things she witnesses, she notices a pattern between certain videos that suggest they’re all being made by the same person, in the same location. Each displays a recreation of a particularly heinous murder, some so outlandish Margot doubts their validity. Further investigation reveals these are all recreations of scenes from the infamous “Faces of Death,” a 1978 home video sensation that supposedly featured footage of real homicides. The tape and its many sequels were latter debunked, but the killer here sets out to rectify that, making his killings all too real.
In the script, director Daniel Goldhaber and his cowriter Isa Mazzei touch upon the harm social media does and how it has become not only an outlet for the display of aberrant behavior but also a perverse avenue for acceptance. Their conceit is their killer (Dacre Montgomery) is a frustrated artist who creates these videos so that he may bask in the many “likes” that come his way from the deviants that praise his work. Making his victims vacuous, social media influencers passes for social commentary on their part.
The problem is, “Faces” is an extreme example of what it purports to criticize. As it pretends to criticize the vagaries of the internet’s violent content, it presents one disturbing image after another. People being scalped and their brains eaten, a dismembered body being dissolved by acid and still more moments that don’t deserve to be mentioned are presented in graphic fashion. This is a repellant movie that wallows in the violence it claims to criticize, a film that gives the genre a bad name. That there are some who will like this is nothing new, but no less depressing.
Zero Stars
