Critic Reviews

Faces of Death gives the people what they want while constantly probing the viewer as to why they want it, all the way through to an ending as bleak as the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The uncommonly entertaining horror film, the third from the Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, is a clever, nastily contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride.

In an era where studios are obsessed with reviving ostensibly comforting intellectual property, Goldhaber has twisted the end-goal of modern Hollywood radically and beautifully.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

On one hand, Goldhaber’s film is a terrifying, stark, oppressive horror film that outscares the other modern slashers. On the other it’s an intelligent treatise on the grim obsession we have with being obsessively grim.

Though mostly played straight, Faces of Death has a wicked sense of humor that’s used in a commendable manner. It’s not overplayed, but always lurking under the surface, and it provides some of that aforementioned twisted fun.

What “Scream 7” should have or at least could have been, “Faces of Death” effectively digs deeper into the themes that the Ghostface franchise has only been flirting with recently, particularly the impact of becoming not just numb to online violence but weaponized by it.

Faces of Death is “ambitious” trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence.

There's a lot of room for cheap, silly schlock here, but Goldhaber and Mazzei actually attempt to take this (sort of) seriously, which results in a far better movie than you might be expecting.

Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.