Some horror movies want to scare you. Faces of Death wants to make you feel complicit — and it mostly succeeds.
The Setup
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber (the filmmaker behind the underrated cyber-thriller “Cam”) and co-written with longtime collaborator Isa Mazzei, this is less a straight remake of the notorious 1978 “mockumentary” and more a sequel that lives in its shadow. The film stars Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, and Charli XCX.
Ferreira plays Margot, a content moderator whose job is scrubbing violent and disturbing footage off a TikTok-style app, her days broken up by grim flashes of ultraviolence hidden in an otherwise mundane feed. When she starts noticing that some of the clips crossing her desk look suspiciously like restaged death scenes from the original 1978 Faces of Death film, she can’t let it go — especially once she starts to suspect one of the “victims” might be a real missing person.
What Works
This is a smart hook, and the movie knows it. Rather than just chasing shock value, the film is really interested in the pipeline between real human suffering and internet virality — how horror gets flattened into “content,” and how the people watching (and moderating) it become numb passengers in someone else’s tragedy. The corporate, sterile visual language of Margot’s workplace is a clever contrast to the raw, grainy “found footage” aesthetic of the videos she’s investigating, and that tension carries a lot of the film’s best moments.
Ferreira anchors the movie well, playing Margot’s slow unraveling with a believable mix of curiosity, dread, and self-destructive obsession. The supporting cast, especially Montgomery, adds enough unpredictability to keep you uneasy about who to trust.
What Doesn’t
The back half loses some of its nerve. Once the mystery-thriller plot machinery kicks into gear, the film trades some of its sharper commentary for more conventional slasher beats, and a couple of character decisions late in the story stretch believability past the point of frustration. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it does keep the movie from being the instant genre classic it’s clearly aiming to be.
The Verdict
Faces of Death (2026) isn’t just cashing in on a shock-value title from nearly 50 years ago — it actually has something to say about why we watch what we watch, and it says it with style, a great lead performance, and real nastiness when it wants to. It stumbles in the final stretch, but it earns its scares and its ideas in equal measure.
Send Help is rated R and is now available to stream.
RATING: 4/5