A young woman, traumatized by a past event that was posted online, gets swept up in a killer’s quest for online infamy. There’s a bit of cultural criticism in the movie mix about the destructive, manipulating side of social media. But the majority of this pic is a profane and brutally flesh-rending mess.
Something happened to Margot.
It’s in the past and she doesn’t like talking about it. But thanks to the never-dying internet, it follows her everywhere.
It all happened while she was filming a video for social media. Though that recording was given to the police as part of an investigation, it was leaked to the internet. And now Margot is regularly recognized as the “Train Video” girl. In short, she knows how awful internet notoriety can be.
That’s what motivated her to take a job with Kino Moderation.
Kino is hired by social media companies to sift through their uploaded videos and flag anything that might be worthy of removal. You know, those vids that are too gory, too sleezy or too societally corrupting. Platforms don’t mind clips containing a little of all those things—because, hey, that stuff draws viewers—but not too much.
As an employee of Kino, Margot spends her days sitting in a cubicle, gazing at peculiar and, often, rather nasty videos. Many people find the job to be mind-numbing, but Margot sees it as her mission. She doesn’t want others to go through the kind of torment that she’s had to endure the last several years.
Of course, even a worthwhile mission can come with on-the-job struggles. Margot recently found some slasher-style videos in her streaming cache that she thinks may be real. One shows a man being electrocuted in a grisly way. And another depicts a man killed, his scalp peeled back and his brain chopped up.
Upon showing these vids to her boss, Josh, however, he just laughed. They were so viscerally gruesome that he determined they couldn’t be real. Just good fun. The users will love them. He tells Margot to leave the video up: “DIY horror is trending right now,” Josh tells her. But she can’t let go.
Not only is Margot convinced that the videos are real, she’s willing to violate her company non-disclosure agreement to post online about her suspicions and try to track down the videos’ creator. And she soon discovers that one of the videoed victims was a missing person. At least she thinks he was.
Problem is, Margot isn’t the only one who’s scouring the internet for bits of information about the videos and their maker. The creator of those gory videos is keeping track of conversations and reactions as well. He’d love to see his videos go viral. And he just spotted a rather noisy commentor asking all sorts of questions. Some people are calling this person the Train Video girl.
And surprise, surprise. The creator (the killer) is just as interested in finding this Train Video girl as she is to find him.
It could make for a very viral meeting.
Margot is trying to do what’s right. She’s compelled by her own personal pain, but she also believes that horrible content shouldn’t be posted online—and the person who made it should be brought to justice. She believes that some people will see deadly, bloody stuff online—even if its fake—and be driven to repeat it. (And in a sense, that fear is proven out.)
Margot’s roommate, Ryan, cares for his apartment-sharing friend and tries to help her step out of her self-imposed isolation. Margot eventually puts her own life on the line to save innocents held captive by the killer.
After watching a gruesome video, one commentor states, “If I can get closer to God by eating brains, why not?” Someone notes, “We’re all going to hell anyway.”
We find out that both Margot and Ryan identify as LGBT. They briefly talk about their sexual preferences and mention past relationships.
We see a number of online videos containing sexual activity and nudity (bared breasts and backsides). Margot stumbles across a male/female couple having grunting sex in a stairwell. Both participants are clothed except for their dropped pants and bare rear-ends. A pair of influencers dance for a TikTok video wearing revealing bikini tops.
[The following section contains spoilers]
Early on, the movie illustrates Margot’s job by showing us a variety of violent videos she watches. We see people falling, a man being hit by a speeding truck, and a naked victim being dragged away in the jaws of a bear, for instance. We also see a video of a young woman slipping on train tracks and being hit by a speeding train. (This video is shown repeatedly, and each time it cuts off just before the gory aftermath.) Ryan watches a horror movie depicting a man’s arm being bloodily hacked off.
The film also makes it clear that the killer is attempting to recreate violent murders from the original 1978 Faces of Death movie. It shows us the source material in several cases. For instance, we see the original film’s depiction of men battering a locked-in-place monkey and then peeling back its scalp and skull and eating its brains. We see the scene duplicated on a human subject, with chunks of the man’s brain matter removed but not eaten.
We see men electrocuted and a man riddled with bullets from a firing squad. The results are brutal and bloody. Gore splashes the scenes. (An online viewer of these recorded moments declares that he is a forensic scientist and that the recorded murder scenes present realistic bloodspray patterns.) Two individuals are decapitated (off screen) and their heads are both placed on plastic mannequin bodies. A running woman is shot in the side and then her profusely bleeding body is wrapped in a large sheet of plastic.
Some scenes feature people beating, battering and thumping each other around a room. (Some are male-on-male, others male-on-female.) In one scene a man is subdued and has his throat slashed. We later see this man’s body chopped up into several large pieces in a plastic bin. The killer films himself pouring flesh-sizzling acid on those remains. Some attack victims (including Margot) are left heavily bruised and bleeding. Margot has a large gash on her forehead slowly stitched up by a nurse.
During a different struggle, a guy is repeatedly stabbed with a small blade in the side, arms and legs. Eventually this individual is stabbed several times in the upper torso with a large chunk of metal. The camera watches as he bleeds out from his multiple wounds.
There are more than 20 f-words and some 10 s-words scattered throughout the dialogue along with multiple uses of “d–n,” “b–ch,” “a–hole” and the c-word. God’s name is misused several times (once in combination with “d–n”).
Margo repeatedly consumes little blue pills from a small baggie. (We’re told it’s a stimulant.) The killer injects his victims with fentanyl, knocking them unconscious. After escaping the killer, Margot is suspected of being a fentanyl addict and given with a Narcan nasal spray by a nurse. (She later uses this drug.) One of Margot’s fellow workers smokes marijuana on the building’s rooftop and offers her a drag (which she refuses).
Margo break company policy and smuggles a drive into work to steal information from Kino servers. The killer has a secreted away area in his house that he uses to cage, incapacitate and kill his victims. The killer declares that the first role of social media content creation is to “give the audience what they want,” even if that is disgusting stuff. People begin copying the killer’s videos, presenting the murders in “lighter,” non-deadly versions. The killer is excited when his videos are discovered to be real and go viral. “People love me,” he tells Margo. “It is the attention economy, baby. And business is booming.”
Back in 1978 the original Faces of Death dribbled onto the movie scene as an exploitation documentary showcasing a “pathologist” who displayed film footage of bloody and gruesome deadliness. Some blood-soaked images in the pic were real, many were staged. The gory film caused outrage and was banned around the world, but it still ended up being an under-the-counter moneymaker in video stores.
Director Daniel Goldhaber is relying on rumors and memories of that old, real-world flick to stir up interest in a new Faces of Death. Only this time it comes with a social media twist.
Frankly, the film does lift up a few musings about the fame-promising manipulation of social media. It points to humanity’s fixation on cruel, painful things; our collective brokenness and mutual flaws. In a way, you could say that the film even reprimands its own viewers for being drawn to the garbage they’re currently watching. However, that meta-examination and wrist-slap only fills some three or four minutes of this pic’s 97-minute run time.
The rest of the film is far less thoughtful. Faces of Death is a profane, bloody, brain-mulching splosh of a movie that’s weakly written, over-acted and, well, garbage.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
