Faces of Death (2026) - Movie Review
What If I told you that SHUDDER funded a redditor’s wet dream?
What if I told you it tries to utilize the tropes of extreme horror to wag its ham-fisted sermon down to us sweat hogs in the cesspool?
Would you be shocked to learn that it’s a flaccid attempt at nostalgia baiting a subject that even those of us who are fans of the sub-genre don’t have found memories of?
Strap in everybody, this is gonna be a wild one.
Let’s discuss.
Faces of Death is a 2026 voyeur horror film brought to us by writer/director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei. Both are Ivy League graduates whose only credits are on each other’s projects. You may recognize them from their viral hit in 2018, CAM. This is a fantastic juxtaposition with their recent release.
CAM was a unique and refreshing meta-horror with a novel concept. It was a micro horror that played on both the guilt of the viewer and the guilt the sex worker feels in sacrificing too much of herself. A little self-righteous? Absolutely, but woven into an entertaining, well-executed concept.
Faces of Death feels like they wanted to make a quick buck, cutting and pasting shots and ideas from the cutting room floor of CAM, and then bought the rights to use the Faces of Death branding, which I’m sure cost little more than a hand job in a dark alley.
The film focuses on Barbie Ferreira, a recovering addict struggling with the trauma of accidentally killing her best friend in an attempt at viral fame. She has become a shut-in, spending every day going to and from work. She is even up for a promotion at a streaming service content moderator call center. However, things take a sinister turn when a series of graphic videos come across her workflow that defy explanation. The deaths look real, while the quality of the filmmaking looks hokey. But when Margot discovers a link to an old series of B-movies, she begins to connect the dots to a pattern of missing persons. Will she be able to find the perpetrator in time to save his future victims, or will she star in one last viral scene? Find out in tonight’s feature: Faces of Death.
Yeah, I’m mystified this got funded too.
For those of you not familiar with the series of horror mockumentaries from the late 1970s. Here’s the context I’m certain none of the filmmakers understood. These movies came out in the age of VHS, were poorly shot, and were watched on screens that were slightly larger than your Apple Watch. Were the films actually banned in 48 counties? Absolutely, as are any films that show animal abuse, simulated S.A., and the other themes made famous by the UK’s moniker: Video Nasties.
Yes, the films were infamous, but only because in a pre-internet world, they were shocking. Especially when clips were cleverly edited and published on Limewire or Kazaa. This led to schoolyard tales of finding a video where a dude’s throat got cut for real. However, when looked at in high resolution, it was obviously fake (for the most part). I believe the animal abuse was real, as were many of the shots in the morgues and some other public tragedy footage.
It was actually a film that was released twenty years after Faces of Death, Traces of Death (1993), that featured real stock footage of death and mutilation.
This is the one that scarred me as a child.
The dialogue is as pretentious as you’d expect from two Harvard alums.
Dialogue is hollow, filled with expository small talk that sounds more like a corporate training video than an Indie Film. One example is the first time we see Josh, Margot’s boss, played by the scene-stealing Jermaine Fowler. She presses the emergency button on her desk (which, as a former content moderator / call center worker, I can testify is real), and Josh jogs over to her desk, and within a few seconds he says little more than, I dunno, maybe it’s fake, why are you freaking out, I got you this job because—we never get any more information. The actor was essentially forced to enter stage left and vomit this exposition onto the screen in an overly melodramatic way.
What’s really strange is that in this scene, we’re supposed to be on Margot’s side in this “argument.” But, nonsensically, she’s 100% in the wrong. The never-ending montage of social media videos and fake snuff films she moderates shows how heavy-handed her rejection of content is. It’s not objectively a bad thing. You need people who walk a hard line to make up for the moderators who have too loose a wrist. She acts like he’s being unreasonable, but Josh is saying something to the effect of, “You take this job too seriously; I don’t want you to hyper-fixate. Indie horror is huge, and the company is looser since it’s a major cultural fad.” He never tells her not to censor it or age-restrict it, but that’s how the film wants us to view it. However, she could have easily clicked remove, or age restrict if she so chose. It’s the character’s own inability to make a judgment decision that ruins her own life.
It doesn’t help the viewer’s opinion of the character when she is popping Adderall out of a comically gigantic Ziploc bag (which, as a recovering addict, I can say is 1000% fake. Call center workers are like flipping MacGyver when it comes to hiding their stash.)
Her roommate, whose name I never caught, has known her forever, and has stayed by her through all of this turmoil. She has no family, no other friends, and he’s always going to be there for her.
How do I know this?
Because he walks into the room and word-vomits their entire history in his first scene.
Again, the actor plays their role well, but the half-assed script didn’t even try to give him something to work with. Which is a shame, because Aaron Holliday is a talented actor.
There are a lot of things in this movie I like, but it’s really hard to overcome a preachy narrative and a protagonist who’s a Spun-out Karen who doesn’t use computers outside of work due to her previous social media manslaughter but has her own Reddit account and utilizes its magical powers to get instant resolution.
There’s a point in the film where Margot’s roommate says, and I paraphrase, “Don’t you go full-on ‘Don’t Fuck With Cats.’ Which is a reference to Netflix’s viral 2019 docuseries, Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. This is a hilarious reference, considering the second half of the film attempts to utilize the internet as some novel tool against evil, but it’s just too convenient. I rarely use Reddit, but even I know that most threads go unanswered or are trolled mercilessly. In this film, they portray the character as being offline, isolated, and yet she’s somehow a frequent enough user on the platform that she gets answers to her questions within seconds.
It’s even more unbelievable that the killer in the film sees her post immediately. I mean, he is the first to comment. This is lazy storytelling and absolutely was the death knell in the narrative.
This film has one of the most boring, unintimidating, and least convincing killers in horror history.
He’s obviously meant to be a representation of the white male, right-wing, chronically online culture that’s annoyingly prevalent in today’s digital age, but it never gets deeper than the kiddie pool intellectually.
The MF is a manager at a cell phone store and is shown to have access to the entire corporate database of the company. Which, from experience, is absolute horse shit. The computers they use at those places are so far behind the times. I’m amazed they’re able to activate my device half the time. Not only that, when they show the database he’s in, it has not only the client's name and number, but every single detail of her life—which, as someone who has actually worked in that industry, would be redacted.
Dacre Montgomery was woefully miscast.
He was the best part of Stranger Things season 3 and could have been here too, but the shallow portrayal of the Andrew Tate incel is boring and overdone. He’s also way too jacked to ever be a chronically online nerd. I’m talking, juiced to the f***ing gills. He would need to be in the gym 6 days a week, a minimum of 3 hours a day of lifting and cardio, to be in the 0% body fat, musclebound form Montgomery is in, which is another unbelievably lazy detail for a film that already feels like it was an afterthought. His killing outfit is hokey and stupid-looking, I’m assuming to mimic the Masked killers sometimes seen in Faces of Death (which were oftentimes the SFX artists themselves). However, with the poorly constructed kidnapping scenes, where everything is brightly lit and exposed, it just looked lazy and stupid. He has these amazing red contacts that the filmmakers could have used to show the dual nature of his existence. When the red contacts are in, he’s the monster. When they’re out, he’s the vulnerable nerd, but they don’t. The contacts serve no purpose other than looking cool on the poster. He doesn’t even wear them half the time, except when he’s wearing one of them and shooting a dozen times wildly at a half-naked girl running through a public park in an upscale neighborhood. Which, again, speaking from experience, would have gotten him shot by a neighbor or police within minutes. He’s in an upscale, WHITE neighborhood. In reality, if someone’s car backfires too loudly, a helicopter would be dispatched along with a SWAT team by the HOA.
This is a film is made by 1 Percenters who have no idea how the normal world works.
At the end of the film, nothing makes sense. There’s no continuity. We see our killer at work once, but then we see him working on these elaborate kidnappings the rest of the time without any calls from work or any interruptions… which, if you’ve ever been a retail store manager, you’ll know is impossible BS.
The killer is a 2-dimensional caricature of what Nepo-babies fear: a straight white Reddit moderator.
His character is recreating the Faces of Death scenes using real victims as if he’s doing something amazing. However, he has no real motivation. He kidnaps low-level influencers and murders them brutally in odd puppet shows that lack any scare factor, in what initially seems like a message against influencer culture. However, his goal at the end of the film is to be an influencer? We get zero buildup of the character or his motivations. We just get word vomit and a lipstick with a blade in it that might as well be the legendary Excalibur, for how much it saves the day in multiple scenes over and over.
The filmmakers just keep looping the same ideas again and again.
Let’s redirect from the narrative before I have a coronary.
The first forty minutes of the film are well shot, interestingly lit, but the quality takes a big step down as the film continues. The last third of the movie is nearly a silent film. There are loooong stretches without dialogue and long stretches that are meant to be tense, but there’s absolutely no buildup, pacing, or emotion to make it so.
This film preaches at the audience like it’s insightful, but completely lacks substance.
The film bashes you over the head with ideas like violence BAD, social media BAD, and you shouldn’t be watching this movie because it’s encouraging more violent movies to be made, when the film was distributed as a SHUDDER exclusive. Ya know, a streaming platform that only hosts horror films?
This film could have been massively improved with a few simple actions.
One, shuffle the cast like so:
1. Move Josie Totah to the lead of the film and put Barbie Ferreira in the best friend/roommate role. The film would be much tenser if you actually liked the lead character, and Totah has far more charisma than Ferreira and is much more fun to watch.
2. Make Aaron Holliday the killer, as he is much more suited to the role physically as well as psychologically. He can easily look like a chronically online Redditor.
3. Move Dacre Montgomery to the Kurt Yue role of the TV weatherman, because with his alt-right haircut and washboard abs, he fits that role, and maybe we would actually care about a death in the film.
Two, don’t waste your entire budget in the first half of the film, which is what this movie appears to have done.
The biggest sin of this movie is the lighting. While the everyday life scenes with Margo have a gritty look, the killings are shot in bright 4k HD, showcasing the flaws in the SFX and eliminating any chance of anyone taking this movie seriously.
As of this writing, the film is available to stream on Shudder with a subscription and available to rent/buy on all digital platforms.
