Faces of Anne

You wake up in a shabby hotel room with no idea how you got there. You can’t recall your name. You discover there seem to be other young women in other rooms in the same predicament, though one of them seems to know your name: Anne. After an unpleasant encounter with a rather large cockroach, you have a screaming fit. That’s when the nurses arrive to sedate you. And by the way, when night falls, you’ll need to escape from a killer demon with the bloodied head of a deer.

Faces of Anne relies heavily on elements of the slasher film – and in many ways, that’s exactly what it is. But the film is also a puzzle, whose central question – Why is Anne here? – allows us to explore theories as to its solution until the very last moment. Are we inside a video game? An escape room? The mind of someone with multiple personalities? The elaborate and nihilistic fantasy of a deranged serial killer? It’s nothing new to remark that the best horror films are often those that reflect the fears of society; this film builds a clever – and viscerally terrifying – analogy of some of the difficulties faced by today’s young people.

– Nicholas Davies