Anna Biller is one of the few working filmmakers who doesn't just love genre cinema — she thinks through it. The Love Witch was a precision instrument disguised as camp, and The Face of Horror is the same project pushed deeper into the medieval grotesque. Set in a cod-medieval England of smudgy peasants and floor-length gowns, it follows Edward, a handsome, unscrupulous knight (Jonah Hauer-King) and his equally shifty squire Richard (Leo Suter) who murder their way into good marriages and then keep going. The supernatural revenge that follows is the promised genre payload. The film's starting material is Yotsuya Kaidan, the classic Japanese ghost story that has also fed Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata, among others. Biller transplants this into the visual grammar of Peter Cushing-era Hammer: vast oppressive wood-panelled halls, garish Technicolor, women in elaborate gowns arranged like figures in a Ladybird book illustration. The casting is sharp. Kristine Froseth's Eleanor is the picture of decorative blond vulnerability; Bella Heathcote's Lady Isabel smiles with the precision of someone who has studied villainy as a craft. Ellie Bamber's Beatrice rounds out the tableau of women the film is ostensibly brutalizing while actually centering. Biller is explicit that this is not quite pastiche — she's not imitating Hammer, she's continuing in the same tradition, making another film that belongs to the same rackety lineage of melodrama, eroticism, and black comedy. The distinction matters more now than it did five years ago. She raises the question herself: the arrival of AI has arguably hollowed out the cultural value of technically skilled imitation. What Biller is doing is harder to hollow out — it requires genuine love of and literacy in the form, an understanding of why these films worked and what they were doing underneath the garish surfaces. The high point is the memento mori Danse Macabre sequence at Lady Isabel's court — something the review rightly notes Ken Russell might have loved, and which carries echoes of Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death. It's the sequence where the film stops being amusing and becomes genuinely strange. The stamina Biller sustains across the whole film — keeping the register consistently calibrated between laughed-at and laughed-with — is the actual achievement. That balance is what killed lesser Hammer imitators and what makes this one land. The film screened at the London Film Festival, which is where serious cult cinema tends to announce itself before finding its real audience on the midnight circuit. There is a minor loose end — an infant who disappears from the plot — but Biller has reportedly left room for a sequel in adult form, which suggests she knows exactly what she's doing with the omission. This is a film that trusts its audience to understand they're watching something built for repeat viewing and communal pleasure, not for immediate critical digestion.
