Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Year: 2026
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Working for a content moderation site, a young woman trying to ensure others are safe starts to question the kind of video clips she keeps seeing that test her skillset, eventually finding a deranged local is recreating the clips from a famous documentary and must race to stop his intentions.
Review:
This was an intriguing enough, if generally misguided, genre effort. The main factor that works well here is the manner in breaking the fourth wall to offer up a generally unhinged environment where no one can be trusted. The central premise involving her work as a content moderator looking to ensure clips and videos are safe for consumption and having to go through hours and hours of sexual degradation, extreme violence, and gruesome accidents to ensure others are safe and appropriate for others to view already puts this into the kind of environment where she can’t trust her own eyes that much. This type of content being around her for as long as it is starts to unnerve her already to the point of not being able to trust the new crop of execution videos that put her onto the idea that something isn’t right with how they’re filmed and presented how they are.
That serves well enough to get the actual slashing scenes here that come together pretty well. The series of encounters and interactions here regarding the performers in the series of skits where they’re being tasked with recreating viral challenges, faked stunts, or other forms of outlandish content that mimic the videos from the original film, but instead of being faked, they’re turned into real acts of murder and torture for the amusement of others online gives this a really solid and dark touch. From being tied up in front of others who are swinging mallets at your head to crack your skull open, forced to evade a train crossing the tracks just behind you, or trying to dodge a gun barrage pointed at them, there are some rather brutal and graphic setups here that play off of the established nature from the original film, making this fun enough for what it is.
There are some issues here that hold this one down. The main issue here is the bizarre series of tonal inconsistencies that arise from trying to incorporate several plot points that don’t quite work well. The idea of trying to piece together the culprit behind the series of death-filled videos she keeps coming across and learning how to track him down serves well enough, but the process of doing this takes way too long to figure out, which isn’t all that enjoyable to see play out with the type of seriousness that doesn’t match the unhinged nature of the killer taunting her. This carries over into the actions in the finale, where it’s a mixture of serious actions played off against comically over-the-top interactions that leave everything in an inconsistent state, as if everything goes on.
The other issue here is how the film turns what could’ve been more interesting had the plot changed hands in terms of who we’re supposed to be following the entire time. There’s little reason why this content censor is the one trying to get to the truth behind these strange videos appearing and who shot them, as this is tailor-made for a routine police procedural to investigate what’s going on with these videos, as that falls more in line with their job description than a random content moderator. That also would’ve removed a series of bizarre and unnatural interactions here that don’t have any sense of reality behind them and are used to justify her thoughts, giving this some outlandish scenarios that could’ve been worked out of this one and manage to be all that hold this one down.
Overview: ***/5
A better-than-expected if still troublesome reboot, there’s enough to like here that it’s not an extreme waste, but this does have some problematic factors here keeping this one down. Those with an appreciation for the style or approach on display, who are curious about it, or who don’t mind the issues present, will want to give this a shot, while most others out there should heed caution.
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