I remember walking past the videotapes of this in my local video rental store, and definitely wanting no part of it. Faces Of death? Nope. I was living in that bubble too, at the time, that believed these videos were real, and not staged. Listen, when I was in school, they were still showing us these snuff films of horrific car accidents to make us not want to drive ever.So, it wasn’t completely unbelievable that something like this could exist. My video chain had a mature label wrapped around it, so you couldn’t see anything other than the title anyway. Still, it was never on my bucket list. Then, the director of How To Blow Up A Pipeline decides to use the series to comment on our fixation on violence, and I’m now interested in this take on it. After all, directors weave societal commentary into horror films al the time. Think about nearly every Ghostface killer in the Scream franchise, with each one revealing their reasonings like a Bond villain as they assume this time, they will be the killer that survives. As a genre, horror relies constantly on kids ignoring the rules, doing what they aren’t supposed to, and being punished for it. In a way, Hollywood has been trying to scare youth into submission the whole time. Thinking about drugs? Dead. Premarital sex? Decapitated. Ignoring the rules? You’re a goner. So can the new IFC/Shudder release Faces Of death bring meaningful debate to the table?

The answer is… not really. Especially coming off the branch of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, which was more complicated and nuanced, Faces Of Death takes a literal approach to obsession, choosing to paint the entire world as beyond forgiveness, a wasteland of mindless idiots glued to their screens, consuming whatever is thrown at them. Our heroine is Margo (Barbie Ferreira), who seems like the only girl in the world still remotely appalled by violent content, which makes her an interesting choice for her job. She’s a content moderator for a social media platform called Kino, which is nearly entirely video content, which she has to watch and take down whatever Kino believes violates their policy. The problem here, is that the script never really defines that, it is more interested in making sure you know she’s under a non-disclosure agreement.

Margo also got her job from her friend, who is now her boss, who apparently thought she was well suited for this job as Margo is a victim of viral failure, commonly referred to as Train Girl, after she and her sister try to go viral doing a dance on some tracks in a video that does not end well for Margo’s sister. So she rides her infamy through a culture that supposedly can’t get enough of things like her. The oversell is a bit much, because Margo just has no one to ever turn to. She has a gay best friend, who might have been a sympathetic ear to turn to if he wasn’t obsessed with horror. Here, we could have gotten into a conversation on the difference between being obsessed with horror movies that are packaged by studios, with actors and actresses, and obviously fake, versus what is going on in this movie, with violent content appearing real. Margo first starts to notice these videos thanks to their obsession with realism, mimicking the original Faces Of death. In a world of deep fakes, it is hard to tell what is real and what is not, but Margo is still unnerved. that pesky NDA prevents her from apparently doing much about it, except Nancy Drewing her way through the rest of the film.

Anytime she ever needs to talk about what she’s experiencing or going through, everyone she talks to is overly desensitized. The director opts for a world that is far more entrenched in violent content than the totality of our world today, and also fails to make distinctions between people who may not want to watch what Margo has to sit through, but have no problem playing an ultra violent videogame or watching Hollywood produced violent films. Everyone Margo finds seems uniquely positioned to be good at her job, since they are unbothered by anything and everything. Never has a final girl needed a boyfriend/girlfriend, brother/sister, roommate/best friend, mother/father, the way Margot does. This is a character that could have benefitted from being able to bounce her emotional baggage off a neutral party, especially since she herself is caught up in her own viral shitstorm.

So, the messaging didn’t work for me. theretofore, it must be a bad film, right? Not exactly. Even though the structure of the subtext is lost, the director does deliver a horror film. If you are incredibly reductive, the film works purely as a killer obsessed with recreating faces Of Death, and showing you some gory and violent kills along the way. For those wanting to avoid spoilers, the film doesn’t care. it is abundantly obvious really early on which actor on the call sheet is the killer, it isn’t something they try and hide. Through that, you get to see their reaction to Margo trying to hunt them down, and how that factors into their choices about what their next move will be.

I’m willing to entertain anyone who enjoyed this, as it works as a horror title, setting up kill sequences, and delivering on gore. The acting certainly isn’t weak. but, at the end of the day, even though I came in as neutral as possible, I still probably fell on the side that didn’t really want to see it, and my enjoyment of the film was far greater shaped by the plot around teh horror, than the horror itself. I don’t rate films purely on the ability to deliver gory content, though I do believe when an audio description track is assigned to a horror title, it should always meet the moment. If the film is giving all kinds of nasty gore, the audio description can’t shy away, and this certainly does not.

I just can’t get past this bizarre condemnation of a world that doesn’t exist. A hyper reality where Margo, who in and of herself is not a great character on a scale of purity, is seemingly the only person truly bothered. It isn’t the NDA that prohibits her from discussing her feelings, it is the lack of empathy around her, and the loss of morally uncorrected characters, or even flexibally nuanced ones that could be as sickened by what she sees, despite their consumption of mass marketed violent content.

My point is, the script could have been better. for those who only want kills and gore, which is basically what the films undertone is suggesting is everyone, they’ll like this. but fo that tiny percentage that apparently doesn’t know Margo, and may not even exist in this world, they might be confused as to whom the film is sermonizing to. Perhaps the problem is that while the film may want to comment on the over consumption of violent content, it also needs people to consume this violent content, so it fails to offer a deeper meaning, or answers to the problem.

While Faces Of death may think it offers commentary on a world obsessed with violent content, it is unrealistic in its portrayal, leaving our final girl as the only girl, and neutering the subtext to avoid chastising the very audience its needs to buy tickets.

Rotten: 5.1/10