Dashcam, 2021.
Directed by Rob Savage.
Starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro and Jemma Moore.
SYNOPSIS:
An obnoxious internet personality who hosts a music show from her dashboard camera finds herself in the midst of supernatural chaos when she agrees to transport an old woman to an address for money.
Rob Savage delivered one of the few unqualified movie hits of the pandemic last year with Host, which used the ingenious idea of a Zoom séance to channel our love-hate relationship with that particular app into a seriously scary blast of movie madness. The success of Host earned Savage – along with co-writers Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley – a deal with Blumhouse to make another spookfest amid the shadow of COVID-19. With a switch of perspective from the computer screen to a camera mounted in a car, Dashcam was born. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it’s bloody scary.
Boldly, Savage and his team choose to frame this new story from the perspective of a pretty awful protagonist. Annie (Annie Hardy) is the host of Band Car: “The internet’s number one live improvised music show broadcast from a moving vehicle”, in which she improvises raps based on words suggested by the comments section of her live stream. She’s also a MAGA-loving COVID denier who hates vaccines and mask mandates. We meet her as she travels to the UK to meet with old friend Stretch (Amer Chadha-Patel) and his very COVID-conscious partner Gemma (Jemma Moore from Host). After the inevitable barney splits them apart, Annie accepts an envelope of cash to taxi a mute old woman (Angela Enahoro) to an address. Almost immediately, strangeness ensues.
It’s important to stress from the outset that Dashcam is not simply a retread of Savage’s surprise hit from last year. Host was a controlled movie, which strictly followed the limitations of its format and worked hard to find scares within those restrictions. Dashcam is a looser and more unruly beast, which grabs at terrifying moments like a cash-strapped contestant on Supermarket Sweep desperately groping at an enormous foam banana. It’s a proper trolley dash of horror, and it feels like you’re buckled into that weird little child seat from the first frame until the last moment of the delightfully brisk sub-80-minute runtime.
That might sound like a criticism – and perhaps it is in terms of logical coherence and narrative rigour – but Dashcam is an absolute thrill to experience. Hardy is an obnoxiously entertaining presence throughout, helped by the machine gun parade of jokes in the comments section. The discussion forum is a very smart inclusion in the film, combining the numbing banality of the likes of Twitch and YouTube live stream comments with the bizarrely creative humour they’re also capable of – and the horrific abuse. At one point, in the midst of pure bedlam, the chat thread suddenly starts debating gun laws in the USA vs. the UK.
Dashcam revels in chaos and contradiction. It’s silly, bloody and knowingly unhinged. Savage knows that the plot is threadbare and nothing makes a great deal of sense, but he makes up for it with wacko invention and a rich vein of dark humour. No movie has ever made a scarier use of a fairground teacup ride. Despite its lo-fi aesthetic and superficial connection to “screen life” films like Unfriended and Searching, it’s a profoundly cinematic experience which deserves to be seen in a room full of people who are all on the ride together.
What Savage has done with Dashcam is very interesting, capturing the spirit of a truly unleashed filmmaker allowed to deliver his vision in more or less unfiltered form. Sometimes that works for the better, and sometimes it falls a touch flat but, in an 80-minute burst of frenetic energy, the positives far outweigh the negatives. The Savage-Shepherd-Hurley collective has delivered another winner, which begs the question: which innocuous bit of tech will they turn into a terrifying movie next?
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.