Faces of Death review – rework of notorious video nasty turns horror voyeurism into moral panic fable

A retelling of the 1978 ‘video nasty’ follows an online content moderator faced with steadily more appalling footage but reverts to generic bloodlettingEmerging amid the original 1970s home-rental boom, John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 film Faces of Death was an ultra-morbid extension of the so-called “mondo” genre. Mashing up gruesome footage – much of it faked, some of it legit enough to provoke ghoulish chatter – it achieved sleepover notoriety and then received a further publicity boost upon making the DPP’s “video nasty” list. What comes now, nearly half a century later, is less a reboot than postmodern rethink. Daniel Goldhaber, who broke through with 2022’s tense social-activism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has patched some of the original’s images into a more conventional digital-age horror narrative that initially resembles an American equivalent of Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor: a film worrying away at what our ravenous eyes now consume and how good it can really be for us.A thoroughly committed Barbie Ferreira plays Margot, a pill-popping content moderator sequestered within a tech firm’s faceless HQ, attaching appropriate warnings to user-generated footage. Off the clock,…

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