By Dolores Quintana
Faces of Death is a film that is both terrifying and exhilarating. It is intelligent, perceptive, and gory filmmaking that shows you both sides of the coin, the victim and the serial killer, the consumer of online “content” and the rapacious creator through the lens of today’s world, when everyone is whipping out and living through their phone camera. When everyone is trying to score the attention they crave on the internet.
Faces of Death is impressive in its immediacy and its insistence on the damage that our “attention economy” is doing to humanity, because “business is booming”, is incalculable and being enabled without thought to where it might lead us. You can acquire tickets here.
Creating a new film around the original Faces of Death is quite difficult because it is a revered curio of the horror genre’s past, with a fearsome reputation, and you are updating it in a world where you can watch real people die on social media. It is not a remake. What Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber have done is miraculous; they have updated the mondo movie in an intense way that drags the viewer into the action, even though it does not claim to be real life.
You can watch the trailer here, and the film comes with my highest recommendation:
It merges the narrative film with the immediacy of found footage and the viral video. It has an incredible brevity as a film, in that the central premise is quickly but accurately sketched, and then the story hits with one crucial incident after another, with requisite moments of ironic levity, and the actors take on the characterization on through their performances. There are only brief explications of character backstory, so it doesn’t get in the way of the high-speed rail locomotion of the tale.
Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery’s performances are excellent. No one in this movie is a cartoon monster, and even the people you don’t like are shown to be human beings who feel, choke on their own fear, and bleed just like we do. Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Kurt Yue, Ash Maeda, and Jermaine Fowler give lived-in performances. When they fight for their lives and breathe their last breath, you can feel it.
Every time you see a video in which someone is injured or dies, that is a real person. The filmmakers don’t want you to have the dissociative protective layer that grows on your soul the longer you scroll, and the film pushes your face towards the horror and compels you to look. You can’t look away.
You can be the person who cares about others or the person who considers other human beings as a means to an end.
I have seen someone die on camera. During the Iranian Green Revolt, Twitter was refreshing so fast that the servers almost couldn’t keep up. I had seen hints about a woman named Neda, and the video crashed into my feed. In the video, you see the joy of freedom in her face until you hear the crack of a rifle, and her face goes slack as the life starts to bleed out of her body, and the light dies in her eyes.
Neda Agha Soltan. I will never forget her, and when you are privileged or damned enough to see the moment someone leaves their body, you shouldn’t reduce it to a moment of entertainment. We are all endlessly and morbidly curious about death, which is where the original inspiration and popularity of the original Faces of Death from 1978 came from, but it is the one thing we can’t escape.
Dacre Montgomery is really frightening during his bouts of rage and his moment of sheep-like duplicity. His gaze, when you can see the wheels and levers turning in his head, is disturbing on a different level. So, he is scary pretty much all of the time. The worst thing is that I knew someone a lot like him. Montgomery has a fearsome level of dedication to this role.
Arthur is an empty house: forlorn rooms, echoing hallways, and windows covered in dust filled only with free-floating rage. Arthur is a pitiless yet pitiable person who doesn’t seem to engage with life unless it is on screen or filming another gruesome murder. He’s locked into a loneliness that is eternal.
You can see who Arthur and Margot are and the impulses and needs that drive them to do what they do. The exceptionally talented cast does a wonderful job of making sure you can see them think the second before the killer strikes.
Barbie Ferreira’s Margot Romero (love that last name) is a final “girl” for the digital age. After her initial actions that set the plot in motion, she thrums with lightning and uses her brain to stay alive, but even then, what she has done and survived brings her out of her online infamy and shame back into the real world. Ferreira has not only a firm grasp on the role but a deep well of empathy for others that is crucial to Margot.
She goes from a guilt-ridden person who plays the scene of her mistake in her mind over and over to someone who knows that something is wrong and won’t stop until she has convinced the authorities, and failing that, takes the disturbing matters into her own hands. All of that hyperawareness and ability to problem-solve that came out of her tragedy becomes an asset rather than a liability.
Goldhaber and Mazzei use their film to hold up the mirror of our society’s growing online narcissism up to our own faces and give us a glimpse of the skull beneath the skin, which syncs with the original FACES OF DEATH’s aims.
Curious about death? Here you go. Everything we watch changes us, and we can either change into bored thrill seekers, apathetic drones, or people who know what’s up and won’t stand for it anymore.
Faces of Death is a rage-fueled leap into a blood-drenched hell of being “too online,” a grotesquerie of human destruction that runs on likes and comments that does not judge you, but simply stares into you, knowing that one day, your time will be up.
