The Faceless Man (2019) Review
The Faceless Man (2019) Review
Emily Beckman (Sophie Thurling) is a recovering cancer survivor of three years. Faced with her fear of getting sick again, her best friend Nina (Lorin Kauffield) plans a weekend away. Six friends venture out to a country holiday house to party over a weekend. Cut off from the rest of the world they soon learn the inhabitants are unsettling red neck individuals who terrorize and humiliate travellers. At the same time a paranormal monster seen as the faceless man haunts the house pushing the friends to their limits.
As a fan of Ozploitation flicks I was very much looking forward to writer/director James Di Martino’s feature film debut THE FACELESS MAN. With the idea for the film born from the director’s own personal experience with cancer and made with monies raised by crowd funding online, this is evidently a very personal project for Di Martino and one he no doubt feels passionate about. With further reading on this title online I learned that his influences for the film were Raimi’s THE EVIL DEAD and Jordan Pierce’s GET OUT – I failed to recognise either in the mix.
THE FACELESS MAN plays like a pastiche of Tarantino’s more notable cinematic moments as tonally Di Martino’s film shifts gears between drama, out-and-out comedy and horror. It’s refreshing to see a film trying to break with convention and throw a number of different styles into the mix but I’m not sure it works. The film’s better moments happen when it’s playing homage to classic films, such as the scene where Barry The C*** (Daniel Reader) dances around to a tune on the radio as his intended victim sits gagged and bound on a chair before him. Throw in someone wearing a sex mask behind them and you have two Tarantino scenes from differing films for the price of one.
As for the titular character THE FACELESS MAN, he barely makes much of an impact, almost sidelined as the story jumps around between cancer drama, annoying dialogue scenes involving the youngsters, gangster scenes that sit uneasily in the mix and stereotyping Aussie rednecks as your standard movie cliché Aussie rednecks. It felt like the film’s title character was forgotten for the most part, like they had an idea for a great ‘monster’ flick but didn’t quite know what to do with it, instead filled in the plot gaps with gangsters and rednecks instead.
The gore is well done but everything else fails to do what the makers would have hoped it would do. The humour jars (if anyone said ‘gangbang’ one more time I would have screamed), the characters are utterly dislikeable (aside from Barry The C***) and the film’s tone and styling jumps around more than a stylus grooving a knackered vinyl record. Perhaps next time we could get a prequel dedicated to Barry The C***, a simple black comedy free of the shackles of other genres in the mix. As Barry Daniel Reader steals the show and has more than enough charisma to carry a film, it’s just a thought, but THE FACELESS MAN always picked up a gear whenever he appeared onscreen with his pitch perfect delivery and displaying enough goods to become an audience favourite.
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