I’ve been tracking Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death through what felt like a mini production purgatory ever since it was announced that he’d follow up his Oscar-shortlisted, Molotov-cocked thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline with a reimagining of the 1978 shock staple—co-starring Charli XCX, no less. The film wrapped in 2023 and was slated for a splashy SXSW 2025 premiere, before getting yanked at the last second. That kind of last-minute pull usually signals a dud—but the whispers here weren’t about quality. They were about content. Not just the expected brutality baked into a title like Faces of Death, but the far more volatile ideas simmering underneath it.
Faces follows Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira), a content moderator for a TikTok-esque platform called Kino—one of the invisible workers tasked with sifting through humanity’s worst impulses before they’re algorithmically drip-fed back to us in our daily doom scroll. It’s psychic self-harm as a day job. When Margot stumbles across a video that stands out for both its slick production and its deeply unsettling violence—soundtracked by the unmistakable narration of Francis B. Gröss from the original Faces of Death—she’s transfixed. Then she happens upon another. The clips begin to burrow under her skin, destabilizing her sense of reality as like the film’s namesake, she’s trying to determine whether she’s watching something staged… or something very, very real.
FACES OF DEATH. Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder. An Independent
Film Company and Shudder Release.
Goldhaber wastes no time laying out the film’s thesis with the surgical precision of a flamethrower. We watch Margot greenlight grotesque violence while flagging genuinely useful content—Narcan tutorials, safe sex education—because the algorithm doesn’t reward empathy, it rewards engagement. When she dares to question it, even suggesting authorities might need to get involved, she’s met with peak tech-bro deflection: that would “bring negative attention to the platform.” It’s blunt, sure—borderline didactic—but it lands because it’s recognizably true. And for every hammer-blow moment, there are sharper, more insidious jabs tucked just beneath the surface.
What elevates Faces of Death beyond its premise is how it weaponizes its own legacy. In this world, the original film isn’t just referenced—it’s canon. A foundational text. A proto-viral artifact. And when the film finally reveals why this killer is resurrecting that imagery, it delivers a grimly satisfying “of course it is” moment that reframes everything that came before it. The characters themselves even engage with that history, recalling their own first encounters with the mondo shocker as if it were an early internet rite of passage. It’s a meta-textual layer that doesn’t just justify the reboot—it interrogates it.
FACES OF DEATH. Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder. An Independent
Film Company and Shudder Release.
And yes, the film absolutely delivers on the gore. But it’s never just there to shock—it’s there to implicate. To mirror. To ask why we’re still watching.
Faces of Death ultimately emerges as a fiercely feminist, transgressive gore de force—one that isn’t content to coast on brand recognition. It’s not just updating the original; it’s in active conversation with it, dragging its themes into the algorithmic abyss of the present day. The real horror isn’t just what’s on our tiny screens—it’s the systems that package it, promote it, and profit from our inability to look away.It leaves you with a lingering question: at what point did we stop being horrified and start being entertained and is there hope?
