The Face of Horror Review: Visually Stunning Medieval Ghost Story Blends Technicolour Hammer Horror with Feminist Satire
TIFF: Jonah Hauer-King and Kristine Froseth star in Anna Biller’s long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch
by Alex Kaan 14 September 2026
Embankment Films
The critique of “style over substance” is a popular one to throw at films as baroque as the work of Anna Biller, and yet the multi-hyphenate consistently avoids that label by pairing her technicolour fantasy worlds — from the John Waters-tinged sex comedy Viva to cult horror comedy The Love Witch — with insightful satire. Her third film is no different. A gorgeous Gothic spectacle that feels like an unearthed time capsule, The Face of Horror is a sharply satirical feminist tragedy about violent man-children that pairs the female rage of Japanese ghost stories with the 60s technicolour aesthetics of Hammer Horror and Roger Corman films.
Transposing the famous Japanese ghost story “Yotsuya Kaidan” to 14th-century England, The Face of Horror follows a roguish knight named Edward (Jonah Hauer-King of last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot) who sets his sights on marrying Eleanor (Kristine Froseth, returning to the genre after this year’s Her Private Hell) despite her father’s staunch disapproval. In a two-for-one scheme achieved under dastardly false pretences, Edward and his squire, Richard (Leo Suter), persuade Eleanor and her sister, Beatrice (Ellie Bamber), to agree to a speedy wedding. But with his plan achieved, the knight finds himself increasingly frustrated with living on Eleanor’s humble farm and repulsed by his bride, who is struggling with a persistent cough.
Embankment Films
With his superficial attraction to Eleanor now spent, the boorish Edward finds himself blessed with an opportunity for another scheme when he rescues wealthy countess Isabel (Bella Heathcote) from a duo of robbers. After her much, much older husband employs him as one of his knights out of gratitude and gives him shiny new armour to look the part, Isabel begins to fall for Edward and floats the idea of him becoming her husband — a notion that puts Eleanor in grave danger and spirals into a story of infidelity, ghosts, and revenge.
From the eye-popping colours of M. David Mullen’s 35mm cinematography to Biller’s stunning, period-accurate costume design, The Face of Horror is an awe-inspiring display of meticulous craft that feels like the antidote to the threat of AI art. Add to that the rich orchestral score by Gabriel Andrés Gallegos — with all the strings, harpsichord, and whimsical flutes for such a period film — and the retro pleasures of Pavel Vojtíšek’s medieval production design, and you have a hearty feast of a film whose style would be more than enough to justify its existence.
Embankment Films
But of course, The Face of Horror is also a film with a meaty subject at the front of its mind, and more so than a horror movie, the majority of its 2-hour runtime is effectively a drama revolving around blunt, uncomfortably relevant observations about misogyny — with the supernatural element arriving rather late in the narrative. There is potential for a more commercial project that abridges the story into a lean 90 minutes and leans into camp elements, but this is not the film that Biller is making. It’s easy to see why many out-of-the-gate reactions at TIFF, which viewed the film as a campy comedy, have irked her, because while there is a stylistic flair and over-the-top tone to the film that recalls camp, the actors fully commit to the seriousness of Eleanor’s plight, even if there is plenty of humour in the discovering and re-discovering just how unmitigatedly evil the men in this film can be.
While The Face of Horror is a film where the artisans are the stars, the performers are equally skilled as they rise to meet the film’s heightened tone. Jonah Hauer-King is both menacing and hilarious as a chauvinist man-baby, while Kristine Froseth is magnetic as she flips the Gothic damsel archetype on its head.
Certain to follow The Love Witch in becoming a cult classic, The Face of Horror is a singular achievement from writer-director Anna Biller, fuelled by the revelatory framework of framing a topical feminist tragedy inside a tribute to mid-century technicolour horror films.
The Face of Horror will have its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.