Kazunari Ninomiya in a scene from Genki Kawamura's thriller Exit 8.Elevation Pictures
Exit 8
Directed by Genki Kawamura
Written by Kentaro Hirase and Genki Kawamura, based on the video game by Kotake Create
Starring Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi and Naru Asanuma
Classification N/A; 95 minutes
Opens in select theatres April 10
Faces of Death
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
Written by Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei
Starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery and Charli XCX
Classification N/A; 98 minutes
Opens in theatres April 10
Critic’s Pick
It has been an unfortunately frightening year to be a horror-movie fan.
While the low-budget Canadian thriller Undertone broke out from the pack, the multiplex has been littered with a smattering of blood-stained casualties that valued easy goop over harder-to-engineer terror, from the latest and by far weakest entries in the Scream and Silent Hill franchises to a handful of too-similarly-themed Satanist romps (Ready or Not 2, They Will Kill You).
But this weekend offers two new pieces of cinematic chum to toss into the crimson-coloured waters – one a unique if ultimately undercooked experiment, the other so fiercely subversive and bursting with ideas (not to mention genuine scares) that it might save this entire year of fear.
Let’s start with the least-scary stuff first: The new Japanese horror film Exit 8 is a complete drag. Based on the video game of the same name, which has been billed as a “walking simulator” (hold onto your excitement if you can), the film follows a lone, nameless Tokyo commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya) who gets stuck in a subway station that loops around endlessly. Eventually, the hero realizes that if he can spot “anomalies” in the station – items or people that shouldn’t be there but mysteriously are – he can move through each of the area’s eight layers and escape what is essentially a living hell.
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The concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance. It is simply a game that you cannot play, and while any moviegoing experience is inherently a passive experience, there is something particularly aggravating about spending an hour and a half watching someone slowly make their way through one giant, barely metaphorical rat maze. And when Ninomiya’s character makes an especially dumb decision and has to start the experience all over again? You’ll be running for your own exit.
Whereas Kawamura has taken a unique and original product and drained it of potential verve and wit, director Daniel Goldhaber has, with his new thriller Faces of Death, injected thrilling new energy and purpose into a property that was long ago tossed into the dumpster of pop-culture history.
Dacre Montgomery in Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death.Brian Roedel/Supplied
In the late ’70s, John Alan Schwartz’s original film Faces of Death briefly terrorized the nation’s more alarmist moral factions by purporting to be a “banned in 46 countries!” documentary featuring real-deal footage in which people were killed via various methods, from accidentally caught-on-tape accidents and animal attacks to public executions.
While time would eventually prove that most of the film’s sequences were faked for the camera – and that the “pathologist” Francis B. Gross, who guided audiences through the manufactured footage, was played by an actor named Michael Carr – Schwartz’s Faces of Death cleverly, if crassly, played with the taboo myth of the “snuff film,” a movie produced for profit and/or kicks that engineers and depicts genuine murder.
Back in the ’70s, discussions of and hunts for authentic snuff films were limited to the grimiest fringes of the culture, real scuzzy video-store backroom stuff. But today, anyone looking for true “faces of death” can pretty much do so with the touch of a TikTok button. And it is this mainstream-ification of sicko-cinema culture that fuels Goldhaber’s new work, which doesn’t remake Faces of Death but instead treats the original film as an object of perverse fascination. 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.
The new film focuses on Margot (Barbie Ferreira, soon to be seen in the Canadian romcom Mile End Kicks), a lonely woman living in the urban wastelands of New Orleans who works as a content moderator at a YouTube-like platform. Every day, Margot must click through thousands of user-generated clips and flag whether they include any drug use, sex or violence. Almost everything skates by – give the people what they want, as Margot’s manager says – but one day a series of anonymously uploaded videos starts appearing in Margot’s queue, each clip depicting some horrific and novel form of death that feels just a little too genuine to be staged.
Barbie Ferreira in Faces of Death.Brian Roedel/Supplied
After conferring with her horror-movie-obsessed roommate, Margot realizes that someone out in the world is recreating scenes from the original Faces of Death, although this time with real victims, and absent any IP approval from the original rights holder, so to speak. And it is that serial killer slash wannabe Hollywood executive, a creep named Arthur (Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery), who begins to fixate on Margot in much the same way that his own snuff films are being analyzed by her.
The resulting film plays like a live-wire cat-and-mouse game, with Margot – who has her own traumatic experience with caught-on-camera death – on one side, and her demented film-bro tormenter on the other. Each is trying to cleanse the zeitgeist in their own way. Margo’s unfortunately ugly history compels her to sanitize the web as much as humanly possible, while Arthur is using extreme clickbait to prove society is just as sick as he is. And if he earns a few platform-generated dollars on the side for his sweat equity? Well, that’s just showbiz, baby.
Goldhaber, whose previous film was the highly charged 2023 eco-minded docu-heist thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has managed again to use the entertainment-first hallmarks of genre filmmaking to tap into the nervous energy of the moment. While the movie sometimes slips into the squishy, jump-scare tropes of the tried and true slasher formula – particularly during the scenes in which Arthur snatches up random victims – the bulk of the story focuses on Margot’s algorithm-enabled mania.
The collision between the perverse fantasies peddled by the original “documentary” and the quote-unquote real (but ultimately still staged) murders in Goldhaber’s rework add up to a conceptually rich and impressively disturbing ride. With this new Faces of Death, modern horror gets the chance to stare back at itself. It ain’t pretty – and that’s exactly the point.