Movie Review: FACES OF DEATH

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 10th, 2026 / 03:41 AM

FACES OF DEATH movie poster | ©2026 IFC/Shudder

Rating: R
Stars: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX
Writers: Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber, based on the Gorgon series
Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Distributor: IFC/Shudder
Release Date: April 10, 2026

1978’s FACES OF DEATH is an odd mixture of faked mayhem and real expirations. Written and directed by John Alan Schwartz (who wrote under the pseudonym Alan Black and directed as Conan LeCilaire), it purports to be the musings of pathologist Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr) on the transition between life and death.

The movie combines staged and actual footage of accidents, executions, newsreels of starvation and war, killings of animals, and so on. Made for a relatively low budget, FACES OF DEATH went on to be a box office and video rental success, not to mention a notorious cult item.

FACES OF DEATH spawned a franchise, which included a greater percentage of sequences of authentic fatalities.

This brings us to the new FACES OF DEATH, written by Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber and directed by Goldhaber. This FACES OF DEATH doesn’t claim to be a documentary in any way, shape or form. Instead, it toys briefly with the notion of the first FACES OF DEATH as a cursed film (spoiler alert: it doesn’t go there) before getting down to its plot.

Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, who works at Kino, a YouTube-type platform for user-generated content. It’s Margot’s job to ascertain whether the videos posted by users violate the site’s standards. Amusingly (and possibly realistically), clips like someone using a banana to demonstrate proper condom techniques are more likely to get banned than those simulating murder.

However, Margot gets suspicious when some disturbing videos are submitted with what she believes may be real killings, sent in by the same anonymous creator. Margot’s boss (Jermaine Fowler) doesn’t want these videos taken down and forbids Margot to investigate. Will Margot listen?

At the same time, we meet Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), whose bland public manner conceals a smirking, bullying sociopath preoccupied with really recreating the (perhaps unreal) carnage of FACES OF DEATH, kidnapping and killing victims in ways that pay homage to the original. He is especially enamored of taking down social media figures.

On the positive side, Ferreira’s Margot is a non-traditional final girl in terms of both physique and motivation. Ferreira is excellent at conveying the character’s inner turmoil and outward tenacity.

Montgomery is superb at enacting the kind of human monster we can’t wait to see get his comeuppance, taunting and sneering and seeming to exude cruelty from his pores. At the same time, he ably puts up a defenseless front when necessary.

Margot’s recent past is a plus (for once, it really does explain a lot about our protagonist), but it might have been fun if we got a better peek behind the curtain at what she’s doing in her digital search for the culprit, especially given her employment.

Where the current FACES OF DEATH filmmakers get tripped up is in the same form/function trap as many other horror movies. There is a lot to be said about how and why people are drawn to depictions of violence, real or staged, a lot to be said about the use and misuse of social media, and a lot to be said about the convergence of depictions of violence and social media.

While FACES OF DEATH is hyper-aware of all of this, it doesn’t have anything resonant to say on these topics. This would be okay if it didn’t seem to be attempting to do so.

It’s fair enough to have a copycat serial killer storyline – it’s so common that it amounts to its own subgenre by now, so why not? – but the influencer angle isn’t as sharp as it might be.

Also, apart from mentioning it in the first place, there’s no real examination of how or even if simulated murders might inspire someone to do it for real. Since whether or not there’s a connection is a big part of the real-world censorship debate that affects (among other things) the making of movies like FACES OF DEATH, it seems like once the topic is raised, it ought to be addressed in slightly greater depth.

Then there’s the matter of a major plot point hinging on both the police and Margot behaving in ways that are hard to accept under the circumstances.

Finally, there is repeated use of the original FACES OF DEATH footage of a monkey apparently being beaten to death. According to Wikipedia, this is staged, but the animal is genuinely terrified. For a lot of viewers, there is a massive difference in watching paid human performers pretend to commit or suffer injury and seeing an animal who cannot give consent and cannot understand “pretend” truly being brutalized. For this reviewer, at least, it’s not entertaining to see the clip even once, let alone more than that throughout the hour and thirty-eight minutes of the film’s total running time.

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