Review: Faces of Death (2026)

Faces of Death (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, sexual content, nudity, language and drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

Before we had LiveLeak, Ogrish, Rotten.com, and other assorted shock sites, we (or rather, our parents) had Faces of Death, a series of "mondo" shock documentaries from the late '70s and '80s that purported to show what even the most graphic horror movies of the time refused to touch: actual footage of people dying, often violently. It's long been debated how much of the footage was real versus staged, but the fact that you couldn't say for absolute certain that it was all staged made it a forbidden fruit for an entire generation of extreme gorehounds for whom the work of Tom Savini et al. just didn't cut it anymore. (Rule of thumb: the footage of wars and atrocities was usually real, the disasters, executions, and accidents were more likely than not to be "reenactments" even if some of them were real, and there are detailed breakdowns out there telling you what was real or fake.) It was a rite of passage for '80s and '90s kids, the closest thing most people had to actual snuff films... at least, until the internet gave us unfiltered access to the real deal, from terrorist and cartel executions to grisly accidents to the "home movies" of murderers, which rendered Faces of Death and the entire mondo genre obsolete as that sort of content migrated online.

How, then, do you go about reviving a franchise whose very reason for being is now something you can find anywhere for free? What Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei did with this film was to tackle that shift head-on, making not a documentary but a conventional slasher movie in which violence on the internet plays a central role in the story and themes. The villain here, Arthur Spevak, is a serial killer whose M.O. is to target media personalities, from filmmakers to influencers to newscasters, and execute them in ways directly inspired by the old Faces of Death films, all while filming it and uploading the carnage to Kino, the YouTube/TikTok-like social video platform that the protagonist Margot Romero works as a content moderator for. All the while, a portrait is painted of a society so jaded and desensitized to violence and cruelty that Arthur's mayhem is too easily dismissed, from viewers who think the videos' professional-looking production values prove that they're fake to Margot's boss at Kino who wants to keep as many videos up as possible for the sake of engagement numbers -- or, as an older breed of lowbrow entertainers (and more than one character in this film) would put it, "giving the people what they want." As brutal and violent as this movie gets -- and make no mistake, this is a capital-S slasher movie that earns its R rating -- the scariest thing about it is the sheer nihilism of the world it takes place in, every nasty trend in internet culture blown up for the world to see. It's the forty-years-later spiritual sequel to Videodrome that takes David Cronenberg's warnings about lowbrow trash media and just barely exaggerates where it ultimately wound up, feeling like the kind of sleazy, dirty movie that you'd get if you brought a '70s/'80s underground filmmaker into the modern day and gave him or her a smartphone able to access all the internet's wonders, a film that felt disgusted and righteously pissed off at a world gone made where you could believe that a guy like Arthur could exist in real life -- which is rather appropriate given the lurid nature of the original film and how it was presented as "the graphic reality of DEATH, close-up." It makes a sick sort of sense that Charli XCX has a small role as one of Margot's co-workers, as this film takes the entire "don't care, just wanna party" ethos of "Brat Summer" and paints it in the least flattering light, and her playing a character who's basically a thinly-fictionalized version of her real-life public persona attaches it irrevocably to its message.

And even if you're not interested in social commentary about the internet, this is still a brutal, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners slasher flick that kicked my ass. The fact that the hook here is that the killer is "remaking" Faces of Death means that there are numerous brutal kills staged in lurid detail, from direct recreations of some of the original's greatest hits (the monkey brains, the electric chair, the shootout) to a pair of horrifying mutilations. All of it is dished out by Dacre Montgomery as Arthur, playing a very different sort of monster from Billy on Stranger Things but still spooking me all the same. Arthur is at once a cold, analytical killer who can occasionally put on a mask of normality and also a delusional manchild obsessed with fame and shaping the culture, the two sides meshing together shockingly well thanks to the bad case of "internet brain" that he seems to suffer from. His "masked killer" outfit works to both hide his identity and keep himself clean, his neat-freak tendencies coming out when he risks getting blood on him, and the scenes of him showing up to do his dirty business of kidnapping his targets before getting to "the goods" were no less scary than what happens after he's brought them to his house of horrors. Montgomery is terrifying as Arthur, one of the best modern slasher killers I've seen, and he's matched beat-for-beat by Barbie Ferreira as Margot. Having previously had a brush with online infamy thanks to a Kino challenge she recorded with her sister that went horribly wrong, got her sister killed, and then went viral as the rotten cherry on top, Margot got a job as a content moderator thinking she'd be making the world a better place, only to realize that the rot runs all the way to the top, as Kino is only willing to do the bare minimum to police their site so that they can credibly tell activists and politicians that they're trying. Taking matters into her own hands once she starts to suspect that somebody is uploading snuff films to the site for the world to see, she makes for a badass horror heroine who's outmatched and scared out of her wits but pushes on anyway because nobody else will. This film did have some lesser moments, especially some dumb decisions by various characters that felt like the worst sort of slasher stereotype (lookin' at you, Sam, violating every rule of horror movie survival), but once it turned into a mutual cat-and-mouse game between Arthur and Margot around the halfway mark, it dug its claws in and never let go until the end. Montgomery and Ferreira are this movie's heart and soul, and it was they, even more than the effects team and their outstanding work, that supplied the moments in this movie that stuck with me as I came home from the theater.

The Bottom Line

The basic conceit behind this movie was a risky one that could've easily turned into the dumbest sort of cash-in schlock, but the filmmakers understood the assignment and aced it with flying colors, making both an effective satire of the excesses of internet culture and, more importantly, a straightforward slasher flick that feels modern yet can still hang with the classics.