9/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars

There’s something in the air — or on the ethernet cables — of Hollywood. Over the last decade, as screentime has taken a stranglehold on nearly everybody, so too has it gripped filmmakers. They are increasingly focused on our relationship to the screens that consume our work, live in our pockets, dominate our lives. Searching, Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 mystery thriller told exclusively through screens, was a bit of a bellwether for this trend. Since then, we’ve seen the release of its sequel; as well as a Microsoft Teams remake of War of the Worlds; two versions of The Guilty (a police dispatch thriller); and 2023’s phenomenal Red Rooms, a Canadian crime drama for the dark web age. In the last month, there have been two more techno-obsessed thrillers added to that digital canon: Ian Tuason’s Undertone and Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death.

Goldhaber isn’t new to this kind of cinema. His directorial debut, Cam (2018), was an early foray into the screentime thrillers subgenre, focused on online pornography and camgirls. Faces of Death goes even further into the seedy underdark of the once innocuous sounding World Wide Web.

The film follows Margot (Barbie Ferreira), a self-isolating, traumatized twenty-something with a horrible 21st century job: a content moderator for TikTok. (Okay, so obviously it isn’t actually TikTok. For legal reasons, it’s called Kino. But it’s TikTok.) Everyday she’s exposed to countless videos of mind numbing perversion. Things don’t start to go awry until she notices a disturbing pattern from one particular account: hyper-realistic murders, stylized to look like a seventies’ documentary. Despite flagging them as parody, she becomes increasingly convinced these videos are real; and, as the videos get more violent, the account’s popularity grows. The film — which reimagines the 1978 film of the same name as something of an instruction manual — only gets darker from there. Though it never strays from the performances that make it so watchable.

For a film that relies so heavily on each of its characters staring at screens, it is anchored by two distinct performances. Ferreira, always the bridesmaid, never the bride, finally gets a star turn here, dominating the screen as the paranoid, stimulant-addicted Margot. The film’s counterweight, Arthur, played manically by Dacre Montgomery, is the psychopath behind the Kino videos. Both are superb, especially as they draw nearer to each others’ orbits. The film’s energy ratchets up as their game of cat and mouse (who is who is an interesting, ever-changing question) closes in on itself, culminating in an explosive finale.

Goldhaber has proven, time and again, to be a dependable puppetmaster of audience stress. His last film, the phenomenal How to Blow Up a Pipeline (read review here), is a tautly pulled fuse, and though Faces of Death operates in an entirely different genre, the cortisol control is still there. Never quite dipping into horror, Goldhaber is still able to elicit jumps effectively through his production and (especially) sound design. Goldhaber, like Arthur, is meticulously dedicated to bestowing his audience with a film that, at the very least, feels real.

There are no cheap tricks here. The drama is earned; the performance of terror, earnest. Faces of Death, like all remakes and reimaginings, is not immune to derivation, but it is always improving, even when iterating. The film is admittedly far gorier — and far less socially salient — than Goldhaber’s recent work, which can read as lower-brow. On the other hand, it may just be disgustingly digestible. The highest compliment in the age of content is to be deemed ‘watchable.’ And for all its bloodsplatter, screams, and screens, Faces of Death is supremely watchable.

Movie Review: "Faces of Death" Gives the People What They Want