#8 – Faces of Death 

In the Internet age we’ve all come face-to-face with some of the worst humanity has to offer. It’s at the swipe of our fingertips on social media websites that we frequent on a daily basis. I’ve seen it. I’m sure you’ve seen it too. It’s easy to become desensitized if you’re looking in the wrong places. Faces of Death explores that concept.

Margot, played by Barbie Ferreira, is a content moderator on an app called Kino; she manually reviews and flags inappropriate content to be taken down from the platform. While at work, she stumbles upon videos, snuff films specifically, that seem too realistic to be fabricated. Her internet sleuthing finds her entangled with not only her own grief and sanity, but what just might be a brutal, sadistic serial killer. 

Enter Dacre Montgomery, who plays bad very well. He brings a Ted Bundy-esque quality to his character of Arthur Spevak. It’s a truly unsettling intensity that doesn’t relent from start to finish. His obsession and morbid fascination with the 1978 film of the same title is what motivates his killing spree. His recreation of scenes from said film gives him enough plausible deniability online to avoid suspicion long enough to gain the attention of the app’s fickle algorithm, skyrocketing him into notoriety, something he clearly desires. We see him exploit systems available to him to his own benefit. His selection of victims is intended to give us pause to how much should be shared publicly. His audience depicts how intense and attached people can get to an image that is portrayed online; how quickly fanaticism can turn into obsession.

While both performances have their strengths, where they fall flat is the heavy handedness in the script. Both actors did well with what they were given and played intense circumstances in a grounded, realistic way. I never questioned their motivations and the stakes of their reality. However, I found myself frustrated with some of the choices the characters made, especially in the last quarter of the film, but I cannot fault the actors for that.

 The social commentary being made seems a bit too obvious at times, but perhaps that was its intention. In an era where media literacy is in decline, if not dead already, maybe the director wanted to keep things purposely on the nose (the Internet does have a tendency to misinterpret things after all). Or perhaps that’s me looking for extra meaning and metaphor in a place where there wasn’t any to begin with. Dacre’s performance specifically really shines and makes it worth seeing. Overall, I enjoyed this film, but not as much as some others higher on this list.