Movie Review : Faces of Death (2026)

I remember my first experience with internet porn like it was yesterday. Playboy, Hustler and old school smut had no secrets for me, but this was another beast. The constellation of slow loading .jpgs and grainy short clips was not meant to arouse, it was meant to amaze. To expand the sexual vocabulary of horny kids and slimy adults alike. Even though it was (and still is) perceived as devient and repulsive, it redefined the parameters of acceptable sexuality in popular culture.

The Faces of Death videos are a relic from a time before internet's great moral corruption. They were shocking and cursed when they came out and were promptly absorbed into the cultural discourse. Semi-legit gore tapes became something you could watch at your leisure and the goal post for extreme was moved further down. The probability that a new spin on the Faces of Death franchise could shock or even scare people was quite low, but Hollywood tried anyway.

Spoiler: it's not a successful movie.

Hold tight: Faces of Death tells the story of Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira), a young woman ironically working content moderation for NotTikTok a short time after becoming viral for filming her sister getting hit by a train. When she finds videos from a user reenacting classic scenes from Faces of Death, Margot first thinks they are fake. Then she realizes they are real, but no one seems to care that a psychopath is out there killing people iconically in order to get online clout.

Billy from Stranger Things Turned Out Bad

This movie is quite confused about what it wants to be. It’s a spiritual remake of Faces of Death, a metacommentary on its gratuitous violence (as if it was shocking enough in 2026 to warrant metacommentary) and a social commentary on social algorithms rewarding psychopathic behaviors. There's a lot of stuff going on and not all the points have the necessary runway to make a good argument. I didn’t know whether I should be entertained or ashamed of being entertained.

I ended up exhausted.

All I knew for sure is that Billy from Stranger Things (Dacre Montgomery) has turned into a garden variety psychopath who owns a crazy number of weapons and who reenacts Faces of Death in his basement the way geekier men reenact the American civil war. He’s also the bad guy even if Barbie Ferreira has also killed people for clout, but it was someone she loved and she did it accidentally. Billy thinks it makes them alike, but Barbie thinks it makes all the difference in the world for some reason.

This new Faces of Death could live a happy and successful life assuming that it's vapid, vile trash made for streaming, but co-screenwriting and director Daniel Goldhaber feels included to constantly complicate his own argument. Because it’s a very A24 thing to do. Horror movies have to be profound now even if the characters clearly aren't. The ingredients need to make sense for the pudding to gel, but if you replace milk with beer it will taste like shit one way or another. Even if the beer is high quality.

I Don’t Love You, Margot Romero

Another foundational problem Faces of Death suffers from is having a protagonist with muddled motivations. Margot has a bad and somewhat relatable case of the trauma and a more than capable actor in Barbie Ferreira, but investigating and taking down a serial killer is a strange way to deal with survivor’s guilt. It’s not a way to deal with it at all. Margot is just collecting traumas like Pokémon cards. She’s not not helping anyone survive Billy, least of all herself. She ends up even worse off.

One bizarre detail that is never explained the movie is what Billy aims to do once he recreated all the scenes from Faces of Death. There are sequels, but they widely regarded as inferior, straight to video products. He's using up all the iconic scenes early in the movie: the monkey dinner, the electric chair execution, etc. Billy doesn’t really have a plan or even an idea of who he is or what he wants to do outside of reenacting Faces of Death. He's a dealer of death and suffering for and foremost. His cinematographic interest are incidental to his function of giving Margot even more trauma than she already has.

*

Not only Faces of Death is not good, but it’s not even bad in an interesting way even though it had the potential to be. It seems to feel guilty about being a movie where people die a horrible death on screen, which is a huge problem for a horror movie. I don’t want to be lectured on my use of social algorithms while taking time away from social algorithms to try and get my brain back in one piece. I’d watch the original Faces of Death ten times before sitting through this again.

3.9/10

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