It’s not essential to watch the original Faces of Death before you decide to watch Daniel Goldhaber’s slasher, which shares the infamous mondo film’s name. All you need to know is the reputation of said film, and how it informs the kind of story which Goldhaber chooses to tell here. This is not a new reboot of Faces of Death, but a means to reconcile with the legacy of said film. Goldhaber found the fitting way to address this matter in the form of a slasher set within the internet age, which has quickly rendered the shock factor of the original mondo film moot. After all, shock content has only become commodified by social media algorithms, to a point where we become numb to it. That’s the kind of reality that allows a film like Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death to be realized.
Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) works as a content moderator for a TikTok-like platform called Kino, filtering out offensive and violent content. While on the job, she discovers a short video featuring narration from the original Faces of Death, on top of a recreation of a death scene from said film. At first, she thinks it is exaggerated, alluding to the infamy of Faces of Death having detailed, but ultimately faked deaths. However, as more of these videos pop up, their popularity disturbs Margot, leading her into a rabbit hole that points back to a serial killer (Dacre Montgomery).
Building off the notoriety of Faces of Death, Goldhaber takes the route of appropriating the moniker to create a more conventional slasher. Thus, it only feels appropriate that even the original mondo film’s infamy lies in the realization its deaths were all faked, could inspire a serial killer – and allow him to build his own reputation on the internet. It’s an ingenious idea here, considering how prevalent images of violence have become on the internet, especially with the wildly circulated assassination footage of Charlie Kirk, along with live streams of atrocities in Gaza.
Then that’s where Barbie Ferreira’s protagonist has her own role in this situation interrogated. When we learn more about why she took the moderation job at Kino, it seems like this is her own way of reconciling with a monstrous algorithm she has fed into; following an incident where her sister was killed, filming a video for the platform. Yet Daniel Goldhaber’s created something more interrogative with a character like Margot Romero (an appropriate surname, some would say). Yet she’s also played a role in the deaths that we’re watching here, first by feeding into that algorithm with a viral video, but also allowing Arthur Spevak’s killing spree to go unpunished. After all, the sort of extreme content that Spevak provides, taking inspiration from the original Faces of Death is what the people who let a social media algorithm autoplay endlessly until something catches your attention.
Spevak doesn’t occupy much screentime, which ends up helping Montgomery’s portrayal of a serial killer all the more. Yet, those moments when he takes up the screen are highly impressionable at that – only because he has an appearance as ordinary as ever, capable of committing something so awful. In a way, it speaks to the desensitization that people feel upon seeing extreme imagery somewhere, whether real or not. For Goldhaber, it’s the perfect venue to explore how this cultural indifference to extreme content can make monsters out of anyone. After all, life on the internet is built on the thrill of seeing something you shouldn’t, ranging from online pornography to snuff footage, which the original film has carried for so long.
Where the original Faces of Death may fail to phase audiences now that we can distinguish the fake parts from the real, Daniel Goldhaber takes upon said notoriety to hold a mirror to a void we’ve perpetually trapped ourselves within. It’s all felt in how we’re made to see the most horrifying sights imaginable thanks to the reach of social media, but also how “content moderation” plays a role in this desensitization. After all, this is a film all about the age of creating content, where we get fed such images through an algorithm that puts it onto our timeline, to be shared or freebooted en masse. That’s maybe the most frightening proposition upon which Daniel Goldhaber works from, and it might make the perfect case for appropriating the Faces of Death moniker.
Watch the trailer right here (age-restricted).
All images via Shudder.
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
Screenplay by Isa Mazzei, Daniel Goldhaber, from the Gorgon Video series
Produced by John Burrud, Greg Gilreath, Adam Hendricks, Susan Montford, Don Murphy
Starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX
Premiere Date: April 5, 2026 (Beyond Fest)
Running Time: 98 minutes
Cinema from the Spectrum 
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