Faceless After Dark

It's bad enough when a movie wants to be About Something and Have Something To Say. I'm not against social or political commentary in movies, but when that's the sole purpose of the movie, it's obnoxious. I watch movies for entertainment, not a lecture. It's worse when a movie wants to be that, but either fails to get the job done, or is bungled. But it's far, far worse when a movie wants to be that, but is too stupid to actually accomplish its goal. When a movie is so patronizing but also so simplistic, it exposes that the creatives behind it as little more than Twitter mynah birds, barfing out the latest hashtags and buzzword terminology without a unique thought in their brains or fresh perspective to offer the world. You can guess where I stand on Faceless After Dark. What Faceless wants to be is a commentary on ... well, a bunch of things. The cruel machine of Hollywood. The marginalization of "genre" actors. Toxic fandom. Misogyny. Hatred and intolerance hiding behind moral righteousness. It wants be #MeToo's Joker, or feminist Falling Down. And it wants to do all this while flying the flag (or hiding under the blanket) of female empowerment. Here's the problem. Well, problems. The lead character, Bowie, is poorly written. In the build-up to her vengeance ride, we see her suffer such misfortune as being the star of a B-level horror movie ... signing autographs at a convention ... not getting a role in a big studio project because the studio wants a more bankable name, and being bitter that this project, helmed by a friend, is even being approved at all ... and being jealous her actress girlfriend is getting a major role. Yeah, one of the con goers is a little off-putting in his conversation with her, and yeah she gets a few calls from someone blocking their ID, but these are not enough to justify a descent into madness. They sound like ... gasp ... the struggles of hundreds of young actors, male and female, every year! You know how many actors made a couple horror movies and never did anything else of note? You could count the number of major actors who started in the big three horror franchises on one hand. Faceless After Dark wants us to believe Bowie is some superstar in the making that's being denied her opportunity by The Patriarchy and enduring endless torture while she toils in obscurity, but it never actually supports either of these premises. It just screams this at the viewer like a social media know-it-all. Bowie isn't a victim. She comes off as a whiny young adult that can't handle real life not thinking she's the greatest thing since pants with pockets. Bowie sucks. There is no reason to be sympathetic for her "plight", and definitely not her fight back against the system. Without giving her any character whatsoever, or showing her as a victim of an oppressive, sexist regime, it makes her rampage all the more pointless and unjustified. The first person she kills, okay, they did break into her house with garden shears. She does kill him while he's lying on the floor wounded and helpless, offering her the phone to call the police, but fine, it's reasonable to say she wasn't taking chances. But when she lures three more people to her house under false pretenses and murders them? What am I supposed to be getting out of this as a viewer? The movie makes sure to paint each victim with some kind of offense, almost as if it knows it has to justify their murders, except nothing anybody does is worthy of an extrajudicial death sentence. One guy has been crank calling her and has some texts that may be to someone underage. Gross, but, you know, call the police. The next guy is just a sexist, right-wing asshole. And the last is a fundamentalist bigot. She abducts these people, tortures them in gruesome fashion, humiliates them, and then painfully murders them. The message this movie is sending is as toxic as the toxicity its lead is fighting back against. Telling a woman "you're more pretty when you smile" is stupid and unnecessary, but it's not worthy of execution. Talking shit on the internet should not get one a machete through the skull. Not in this movie's eyes. It never once condemns or judges Bowie's actions. It never tries to analyze Bowie's mental state, or suggest it may be wrong to be a sociopathic murderer because someone harassed you online. Nope, the guilty are the guilty, into the wood chipper you go. So, we have a movie with a lead character that is unlikable, unsympathetic, and unjustified in her journey of madness. We have a movie with a moral philosophy of "if you aren't in perfect agreeance with my worldview, you should die". Those should be enough strikes, right? Well, the movie has one more trick up its sleeve, and that is that it has NO tricks up its sleeve. Once the second act starts, when the home intruder scene happens, that's all that's left to this movie. She kills someone, she lures the next person over, sets up the pretense, springs the trap, tortures them, kills them, wash, rinse, repeat, all the way to the last three minutes. Almost a full hour of this nonsense, broken up only by after-effects and color filters vomited onto the screen with no style or purpose, just because somebody's grandma got them sub to Final Cut Pro for Christmas and they wanna try out all the bells and whistles. The last three minutes are a hasty denouement meant to show the relentless juggernaut that is Hollywood, seemingly insinuating that it will chew up and spit out the weak and use their flesh to fuel the machine, and poor Bowie is the latest grist for the bone mill. It built up this young woman and then tore her down. If, you know, you ignore that the reason she's in a strait jacket at the end is that, among other things, she tied up a woman and set her on fire in a kiddie pool, and choked a man to death by cutting off his penis and stuffing it down his throat. But yeah, sure, Hollywood did her wrong. How dare her ex-girlfriend and the industry move on. What a heartless, senseless, pointless tragedy. Fuck this movie. Fuck this tone-deaf and misguided weaponization of feminism and acting like it's a moral crusade. Fuck this movie's paper-thin characterization of both Bowie and her victims, coming off like embodiments of the monstrous caricatures each side of the political aisle thinks the other really is. Fuck this movie circling the same point over and over and over again but failing to actually make one, but somehow having the audacity at the end to waive a shameful finger at everybody but the lunatic. Fuck this movie for thinking that shouting your point can replace having a substantive argument and dealing in social media archetypes instead of nuanced human beings. And most of all, fuck this movie for perpetuating or underscoring every negative stereotype this movie about feminism and gender equality that its opponents already believe to be reality.