Faces Of Death is a so-so slasher too wrapped up in its metafiction

Cam and How To Blow Up A Pipeline filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber recognizes the inherent irony in making a modern, feature-length reference to Faces Of Death—a mondo movie famous for passing itself off as genuine snuff—at a time when the general public is confronted by more graphic images than ever before. Simply setting his horror film, co-written by his frequent collaborator Isa Mazzei, at the moderation department of a TikTok-like app (snidely called Kino) acknowledges that we’re inundated with petabytes of death and degeneracy every day. And that’s just the stuff that turns up on its own! If you can think it up, you can search for it, and almost certainly find it. Recent festival films like Grind and American Sweatshop have begun tapping into the genre potential of this reality, but Faces Of Death most specifically translates content warning culture into the language of the slasher—even if this devotion to the theme undermines its more devious elements.

It’s hard to get caught up in the sociopathic malevolence of a serial killer when so much of the movie around him is about ruminating on the veracity of the carnage he leaves behind. When moderator Margot (Barbie Ferreira) stumbles upon the weird, mannequin-filled reenactments of ’70s Faces Of Death footage—complete with that film’s dry narration and enough visual uncanniness for plausible deniability—at work, she’s troubled, but not necessarily scared. That’s a byproduct of her job, which numbs her to gore more deeply than even her Herschell Gordon Lewis-loving roommate (Aaron Holliday). But that doesn’t mean Margot isn’t traumatized: She’s the victim of her own viral video, the fallout from which has driven her to isolate herself, disconnect with a dumb phone, and develop a pill-popping habit.

It’s an on-the-nose backstory for this kind of final girl, someone driven to investigate not because of a present desire for justice, but because past pain and guilt still plague her heart. But the lack of propulsion does fit with a plot that’s not especially mystery-forward; despite the investigative framing, Margot leaves most of the detective work up to Redditors, while the film itself splits its time with Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), the serial killer filmmaker behind these violent homages.

It’s Montgomery who gives Faces Of Death its energy, his smooth, superficial, Patrick Bateman surface made all the more threatening through the more stereotypical creep signifiers of baggy beige clothes, nerdy glasses, nasally affect, and germophobia. Arthur manages a storefront for a wireless service provider, his administrative access hand-waving away how he’s able to track down his moderately internet-famous victims through their phone use. But anyone can stalk and kill a wannabe influencer; Arthur does it strangely enough to keep our attention. He gets too close, pronounces things a little off, and is just as obsessed with metrics and minor celebrity as his victims. He’s a compelling presence, worthy of the long tracking shot cinematographer Isaac Bauman uses to watch him hype himself up before undertaking a home invasion.