Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber, 2026) Review

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“DIY horror is trafficking right now.” How do you resurrect and reinvent a semi-obscure horror franchise that focused on 'real' death and destruction to shock its audience many years before anyone had even heard of something called the World Wide Web and viral videos? In the case of this unexpected 2026 rebirth of the 1978 original, the approach is to make things timely to meet our current world of social media...

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“Perhaps this is a deterrent to crime.” Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira, Nope) is a content moderator for a video sharing social media website called Kino, where she spends her days trapped in a drab office clicking-through user-flagged videos. Bitingly, endless videos of personal injury and violence get the okay, but instructional videos on how to use Narcan or the proper way to put on a condom (demonstrated on a banana, no less) immediately get the red button treatment for “drug use” and “sexual content”. Robotically churning through the videos, Margot suddenly takes a moment for pause with one particular piece of content featuring an ominous voice over, theatrical staging, and gory death as its centrepiece.

“If I had a clear head I'd blow it clear across the office.” Haunted by her own tragic backstory revolving around a dance video with her sister, that has since earned her the impersonal moniker “train girl”, Margot becomes obsessed with each new #fod2024 video that comes through her content moderation station. Her boss Josh (Jermaine Fowler, Only Murders in the Building) isn't interested in her concerns, dismissing the videos as fakes filled with special effects, but these are in fact real snuff videos being uploaded to Kino.

“They're not just a digital fucking image.” A creepy loner called Arthur (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things), who works for an internet service provider, is hunting down 'deserving' individuals for online snuff movie infamy, such as a local TV news reporter or a narcissistic social media star, but when Margot's vigilante search for the truth begins to cramp his style, things take a nasty turn.

“Do we look like the morality police?” Written by Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber (the latter of whom also directs), this new incarnation of Faces of Death wisely puts a modern spin on the central notion, while having the original 1978 movie be a part of this film's reality so that it can juxtapose the VHS-era version of a 'viral video' (once believed by its viewers to be real deaths caught on tape, which had been mixed with real footage of autopsies, accidents, and human atrocities), with the 21^st Century turbo-injected version. Indeed, the psychological desperation to 'go viral' simmers at the heart of this movie, which takes a justifiably scathing view of content moderation across social media platforms (the director had once worked in that same field).

“Are you gonna go a full Don't Fuck With Cats?” Struck absolutely into the heart of the zeitgeist, and at a time when social media giants are literally being taken to court (and found guilty) over the negative mental effects of their algorithms, where negativity and hatred are the most effective fuel of 'engagement' for financial gain (wide sweeping societal consequences be damned), Faces of Death 2026 has something worthwhile to say. Is it the first to say it? Certainly not. However, the barbed scenes of what is allowed to pass through the Kino content moderators and what is blocked feels pointedly real and is one of the images to linger in the viewer's mind after the credits roll. So too, does Josh's insistence that the company policy is to evade any negative attention first and foremost, with Kino's concern over its viral content non-existent. The twisted lack of social morals at the heart of what these companies have now become are dead in the sights of this movie, and deservedly so.

“I can't believe you like this shit.” There are some nice touches scattered about the film, too, such as the ceiling lights in the Kino office mirroring the 'crossed tape' over the eyes of the execution victim on the cover art of the original movie, while Margot's room-mate Ryan (Aaron Holliday, Sharp Objects) is an artist with a retro interest in videotapes who schools her on the 1978 original after he finds her fast-forwarding through the VHS. Mind you, his collection is random-as-fuck personified with Faces of Death 1978 displayed amidst Witness, Daylight, and more than one copy of Independence Day.

There's also some nice moments in the way the movie is shot, from the soul-sucking Kino office rendered in dull swathes of grey-blues to gaudy washes of theatrical lighting in the bowels of Arthur's home. Meanwhile, the sight of the killer having to take out one contact lens in order to shoot offers a very cool visual of Arthur with one blue eye and one red eye, almost like a nod to the retro two-colour 3D that was briefly fashionable in the 1980s.

However, the film is not without its flaws. Considering the reputation that Faces of Death had, and to some extent still has, the extent of the violence and gore feels underwhelming, while the relatively clean real world aesthetic cannot muster the sleazy, grotty, “Is this real?” underground vibe of the original (not that it ever could have, to be fair). There are also some glaring flaws in the reality of the film, such as when Arthur shoots a rifle multiple times inside and outside of his suburban house – how did nobody see or hear that or even react to it?! – a moment that significantly hinders one's enjoyment of the final act of the film.

The motivations of the killer are also kind of obscure, and at the end of the day is he for or against the content creators of Kino? Similarly, his aversion to blood feels both under-explored and incongruous with the reality of being a serial killer and, indeed, some of the scenes in the film itself.

“It's like this totally cursed tape.” There is certainly plenty of value in this 2026 update of Faces of Death, and it does a pretty good job of using the social media context to its benefit (even if it could have gone further, particularly in the realm of copycat videos), but feeling a little too 'clean' for its own good and failing to really go 'far enough', as befits a movie franchise with such a mythic reputation, can leave the viewer feeling a little disappointed. But there are some gruesome moments (such as the mannequins in the closing minutes of the movie), and FoD'26 at least makes a skeweringly good point about the careless 'move fast and break stuff' modus operandi of the social media giants.