Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
The team behind Cam (2018) took a long look at the genuinely terrible — but brilliantly marketed — Faces of Death (1978), and decided the name deserved better. The result, Faces of Death (2026), is yet another horror riff on social media, influencer culture, and fame that evaporates the second you stop scrolling. The twist? This one’s actually a blast.
Faces of Death: The Players
- Barbie Ferreira [Nope (2022)]: Margot Romero; content auditor for the social media giant Kino and inadvertent serial-killer hunter.
- Dacre Montgomery [TV’s Stranger Things (2017-2025)]: Arthur Spevak; cellphone salesman, amateur filmmaker, and devoted fan of 1978’s viral-before-viral-was-cool Faces of Death.
- Josie Totah [TV’s The Buccaneers (2023-2025)]: Samantha Gravinsky; vapid influencer and unfortunate victim.
Faces of Death: The Breakdown
Synopsis
Margot Romero is a professional doom-scroller. Her employer is Kino, the social media monster that needs someone to wade through the internet’s worst impulses so the rest of us don’t have to. So she sits at her desk — quotas to hit, questionable coworkers to tolerate, break times regimented down to the minute — flagging the worst-of-the-worst before it ever reaches the feed.
Then a couple of mannequin-filled gorefests cross her screen. They’re fake. Obviously fake. Probably fake? And the longer Faces of Death (2026) lets Margot stare at them, the less sure she — and we — become.
Production
Not surprisingly, the Cam (2018) crew came to Faces of Death (2026) with real money on the table, and it shows. Everything looks slick, smooth, and high-end. From Margot’s corporate conveyor belt of a workplace to Arthur’s ominously spacious, weirdly isolated tract home, director Daniel Goldhaber and company make every space feel exactly the way your gut says it should — polished where it needs to be soulless, empty where it needs to be unsettling.
The original Faces of Death (1978) was, let’s be honest, notoriously drab, paced like a dial-up connection, and all kinds of terrible. The only thing it had going for it was an outraged Moral Majority and a generation of curious teenagers desperate to get their hands on it. By contrast, the 2026 version has genuine pacing, a fun story, and a small cast you actually care about. What’s more, while this Faces of Death does fold in clips from its documentary-style ancestor, it uses them entertainingly and never leans on them as a crutch.
And the gore? As you’d expect from a movie called Faces of Death, there’s plenty of it, and it’s well executed. Not everything looks practical, from what I could tell, but the CG is tastefully applied — serving the carnage rather than distracting from it.
Cast and Story
Both leads carry Faces of Death (2026) with ease. Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery each do stellar work bringing Margot and Arthur to life, and — as an added bonus — they somehow get better when they share a scene, sparking off each other in a way that anchors the whole film.
The rest of the roles are mostly set dressing, and that’s perfectly fine. We get Josh, the corporate lackey you’ll want to punch on sight (Jermaine Fowler); Gabby, the nihilistic coworker (Charli XCX); and Ryan, the lovable roommate (Aaron Holliday). None of them get much room to stretch — but it doesn’t matter. They each add texture to the narrative while leaving the heavy lifting to Ferreira and Montgomery, who never once look like they’re straining.
Summary
I’ll be honest: I put off Faces of Death (2026) because of the notorious original it shares a name with. I came in fully expecting to hate it — and walked away genuinely surprised at how much fun it is. The moral, fellow horror greybeards? Don’t sleep on this one just because you remember when its ancestor lurked behind the counter at the local video store. Faces of Death (2026) is now streaming on Prime Video, with rental and purchase options on Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. Give it a shot and let it surprise you, too.
Review by Robert Zilbauer.