"Dashcam" batshit-crazy but nearly torpedoed by obnoxious lead

Dashcam (2022)

“Found footage” has long become the redheaded stepchild of the horror sub-genre. Like anything, there are plenty of good ones out there; they’re cheap to make but not always easy to get right. When filmmaker Rob Savage made the best use of his indoor time in 2020 and broke out with the ingeniously scary Zoom freakout “Host,” he then signed a three-picture deal with Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions. Something tells me his follow-up, “Dashcam,” won’t garner quite the same loving response. How one feels about the film as a whole will come down to their endurance for 77 minutes spent with an aggressively obnoxious protagonist and the found-footage technique itself. 

Indie musician Annie Hardy is hopefully less abrasive in real life because she plays an irredeemable version of herself: a profane, hard-right, COVID-denying troll living in Los Angeles during the middle of the pandemic lockdown. With a GoPro camera strapped to her head at all times, she’s the driving host of BandCar, “the Internet’s #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle.” The shtick is that Annie will take any capitalized word a commenter types and turns it into a freestyle rap. Tired of L.A., she takes a flight to England, where she makes an unannounced drop-in (read: finds a spare key) at the house of her ex-bandmate Stretch (Omar Chadha-Patel) and his girlfriend Gemma (Jemma Moore). After she rides along with Stretch on a food delivery and refuses a mask inside a business, she ends up stealing Stretch’s car. For the hell of it, Annie accepts a delivery. The restaurant is actually closed, but to pay for her time, the owner asks for a favor: drop off a very sick but masked-up older woman named Angela (Angela Enahoro). It’s initially a “hell no,” until Annie sees an envelope of cash. Let’s just say Angela isn’t quite right—and not just because she soils herself in Stretch’s car—and you won’t really care if Annie survives the night or not.

Entirely presented as a livestream with the comments turned on the whole time—if you watch the scroll, one of the commenters even mentions “Blair Witch”—“Dashcam” still manages to be effective here and there. Writer-director Savage once again demonstrates how a filmmaker can use the found-footage aesthetic for jolting spontaneity (and not use an orchestral score that would take one out of the vérité-style experience). He earns plenty of jump scares that are timed just right, including one with an airbag, and there’s even a long take with Angela, her mask slowly filling with blood, that keeps one itching with anxiety. It might be too little, too late for some, but the film does improve as it goes along, as long as the shakiest of shaky cam is not a deal-breaker in a found-footage film. A certain suspension of disbelief is also required, especially when Stretch enters the picture again and has absolutely no reason to climb a tree to help down Angela, who’s clearly a supernatural monster of some sort. 

The real fun sponge? Sticking us with one of the most grating and resistible lead characters in recent cinema memory. It’s a risk director Savage and his writers (Gemma Hurrley and Jed Shepherd) are clearly willing to take and hope viewers just take the ride. The real Annie Hardy is at least going all in, uncompromising all of her warts as an unlikable human being and never having a nicey-nice, 180-degree arc by the end. It’s a 360-degree circle for Annie. In her introduction, Annie wears a MAGA hat and an anti-liberal sweatshirt, and she treats a business owner with a lot of tactless aggression when he asks her to politely wear a mask. It’s not so much Annie’s political beliefs that make her insufferable, but how she goes about sharing them by being a rude, shrill, disruptive tornado of destruction, hate, and shock humor. For another example, she sneaks into Stretch’s house at night and wakes him and his girlfriend up with a “silver lake handshake” (hock a loogie into your palm and slap someone). Yeah, she’s a real peach if peaches shouted “shit on my dick” a lot, too.

“Dashcam” often rears an anything-can-happen danger that’s not evident in every found-footage movie, and that’s what works best about this unpleasant genre exercise. Almost the entire last half somehow sustains a propulsive, truly chaotic intensity. Full of crash crashes, running, crawling, climbing, sinking and nearly drowning, lots of icky blood squirting, and temporary shelter in an empty amusement park, it’s such a batshit-crazy, whiplash-inducing ride that one almost can’t believe how Savage executed it all. Luckily none of us are actually in the car with the crass, unappealing Annie, or we’d be tucking and rolling, even if she was driving at the highest speed. When “Dashcam” gets to the horror stuff, it works. One just wishes it didn’t feel like Savage had contempt for the viewer whenever Annie Hardy opens her mouth.

Grade: C

Momentum Pictures and Blumhouse Productions are releasing “Dashcam” (77 min.) in theaters and on demand on June 3, 2022.