Independent Film Company/ShudderWho on earth would want to reboot Faces of Death? While it’s technically a horror franchise — eight installments were released between 1978 and 1999, all of them going straight to video — the series isn’t famous for its characters, or its lore, or even its special effects. Faces of Death is simply a sicko oddity, an American version of Italian “Mondo” movies that blurred the lines between documentary and exploitation cinema in the 1960s and ‘70s. In essence, it’s just a clip show, a series of vignettes held together by a narrator who explains that what you’re about to see is real. (It wasn’t, but we’ll get into that in a minute.) There’s no real art to it, just a parade of footage purporting to show real deaths by alligator, car crash, electric chair, bullet, and one especially grisly parachute accident, punctuated with interviews with medical examiners and hitmen who make a living out of seeing death up close. “So what?” you might be asking. “I can see strangers die on the internet for free every day.” That is the reason this new, fictionalized take on the series exists, reimagined as a commentary on how having 24/7 access to video evidence of humanity’s worst impulses is eroding the social fabric of American society. The movie’s in to this topic is expected at this point: Barbie Ferreira stars as Margot, a young woman who works a dead-end job as a content moderator for a YouTube-like site called Kino. (To be fair, this movie was shot in 2023, before films like American Sweatshop and Red Rooms that also touch on similar subject matter.) Early scenes of Margot at work highlight the hypocrisy and insincerity of these platforms’ “community standards”: She deletes an explainer on how to use Narcan under the pretense that it “promotes drug use,” for example, while keeping up a graphic beheading video because, as far as her employers are concerned, all violence is fake until proven otherwise. Barbie Ferreira sees something she can’t unsee in Faces of Death. | Indepedent Film Company/ShudderConveniently for her apathetic boss Josh (Jermaine Fowler) — who also prefers not to notice employees getting high and hooking up on their breaks just to cope — proving that anything is real on the internet turns out to be very difficult. Still, for reasons that become clear over the course of the film, Margot feels a moral responsibility to find out if a particularly real-looking series of videos that crosses her desktop are what she thinks they are. What she thinks they are, are snuff films, which commenters on Reddit (yes, the real website) tell her bear a striking resemblance to segments from the original Faces of Death.Discussions of what “Faces” was, and how it worked — Margot’s horror-fan roommate describes it as “the first viral video before the internet,” which isn’t wrong, exactly — are the most cringeworthy portions of the new Faces of Death. The discomfort is temporary, however, as screenwriters Daniel Goldhaber (who also directs) and Isa Mazzei dutifully fulfill their franchise obligations before getting back to their real project: Making a modern exploitation horror film about how the internet has convinced a startling portion of the world’s population that the people around them are not fully human. You can see this phenomenon in “NPC” discourse online, and you can see it in this film, as a character who escapes from the anonymous McMansion that doubles as our villain’s torture den runs up to a mother and her children walking back to their car and begs them for help. She’s bloody, out of breath, and clearly in trouble. In a sane society, they’d tell her to get in, but in Faces of Death, they get in the car without her and speed away. The cops are useless in this movie, too, as they so often are in real life; authority in general is lazy and apathetic, as numb as Margot’s coworker Gabby (Charli XCX), who cackles at gore videos between hits of her vape. Besides Margot, the only person who seems to care about anything in Faces of Death is the film’s villain, Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery), who approaches his grisly “work” with the enthusiasm and discernment of an artist. Montgomery’s mannered performance is a melange of great serial-killer creeps: He seems to have studied Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs and Tom Noonan in Manhunter particularly closely, although that might just be because he’s wearing pantyhose on his head in a few key scenes. Red contact lenses and a blank, featureless white mask complete the startling effect, and when Faces of Death shifts into high gear in its final half-hour, scenes of Montgomery stalking Ferreira around his suspiciously empty subdivision are appropriately tense and menacing.It’s not a snuff movie, it just looks like one. | Independent Film Company/ShudderFor the real exploitation aficionados, however, the most striking thing about Faces of Death isn’t its bleak, cynical worldview, or its re-creations of what turned out to be re-creations of real murders on the original Faces of Death VHS. It’s the fact that this movie really does look like a snuff film — or, at least, what we all assume a snuff film would look like, if they actually existed. (The jury is still out on that one.) Mannequins, plastic sheeting, duct tape, and harsh flood lighting all create an ambience of depravity and imminent violence, a feeling that’s enhanced by Goldhaber and DP Isaac Bauman’s decision to shoot the film on grainy 35mm. Combined with DSLR footage, pixelated digital video, and 16mm scraps from the original Faces of Death, it all looks like something you shouldn’t be seeing, producing exactly the uneasy feeling you should have while watching a movie like this one. Goldhaber and Mazzei seem relatively uninterested in interrogating their own roles in perpetrating a culture of violence by making this film, which is fine; Michael Haneke and Funny Games already exist, so there’s no need to reinvent that particular wheel. What they are interested in is a pursuit that has occupied exploitation filmmakers since the invention of the format, which is taking hot-button issues that most people don’t want to talk about and spinning them into queasy, morally questionable entertainment. If this movie didn’t make you feel like you needed a shower afterwards, then it would be a failure. Luckily, the ick factor here is very much present. From Shudder and Independent Film Company, Faces of Death debuts in theaters on April 10.