Dashcam (2021)

directed by Rob Savage

UK/USA

80 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is one of those recent movies that I put off watching for way too long for no real reason, and I should not have, because it's incredibly good. I've said this about a couple of movies before, but for this one your ability to enjoy it really hinges on your ability to tolerate a narrator who is unbelievably annoying (on purpose). Annie Hardy is more than just the narrator; she's literally the lens through which we see most of the film, this being a found-footage movie. She's the one in control of the camera, although for a lot of the running time it's mounted on her dashboard (obviously) or occasionally is being held by someone else.

Annie is your average MAGA hat-wearing edgelord, newly empowered by lockdowns and vaccines that only seem to confirm her vision of the government - and not only the government, but basically anybody who has the decency to wear a mask and ask that others do so as well - infringing upon her rights. Annie reflects that specific flavor of "rebellion" that emerged during the beginning of covid where going against every reasonable health and safety measure suddenly became the latest and greatest way to own the libs. I don't blame anybody who wouldn't be able to stomach watching a whole movie with a person like this, but I do think that the filmmakers were extremely deft in just how loudmouthed to make her. It's very very very clear that she shares the racist, xenophobic ideas that any given MAGA believer does, and so do the comments on the live chat during the stream that forms the basis for most of the film, but she's not constantly saying these things out loud. The film knows just where to stop so that we get the idea that this is a horrible person we're watching, but we don't feel like the film itself is trying to offend us or doesn't care if we do get offended.

The setup of the film is that Annie does this livestream where she improvises horrible white person rap over recycled beats that incorporate words suggested by people in the chat. This is also done from a moving car, which is definitely totally safe and fine. She decides for some reason to quit America and go visit her friend and former bandmate in England, but of course there's rational people there trying to mitigate the spread of a deadly virus too, so she very, very quickly runs afoul of basically everybody she encounters. After getting kicked out of her friend's house by his girlfriend on sight as soon as she enters wearing her "red hat" (go, girlfriend), she trolls her friend by picking up an order for him (he works as a delivery driver and left his work phone in the car), but things start to go extremely wrong when she gets to the restaurant.

Describing these things makes it seem like there's a concrete direction in which Dashcam is heading at any given moment, which is the opposite of reality and the opposite of why it's so fun to watch. It's nonstop once Annie touches down in England. You can't predict where it's going to go next or what's happening or why. There's no moment of safety because anything could happen at any time and none of the people in the film are remotely prepared to deal with any of it.

You would think that having a running commentary (the live chat) of all this on the side of the screen for much of the film would get annoying fast, and it kind of does, but it's also one of the things that makes this so good as a horror movie. I'm going to reference a film here that has nothing to do with horror or anything whatsoever that I'm talking about, but I think it provides a good parallel. In the fantastic and inimitable Ugandan action film Who Killed Captain Alex?, there's a running commentary throughout the entire movie where a narrator remarks on what's going on, roots for the characters, makes jokes, and generally does things that we might expect to hear if we were watching the movie with a goofy friend right next to us. It has the effect of drawing our attention to what's happening on screen and making us feel more invested in it. Dashcam's live chat is the same basic premise, but for horror. It ramps up the tension because we're not watching it alone, we're watching it with people who are all experiencing the same thing and, when they're not asking the characters to take their tits out, they're all terrified too. Even though we know it's fake, having other people along for the ride feels different. And if you want to ignore the live chat, the movie definitely works without it, too. I think the most important thing from it that gives some hint as to what's happening is that one person mentions how the restaurant Annie ends up in is located in an area with a lot of UFO sightings. We also at one point see someone claim to be from a news station and ask if anyone wants to talk to them about the stream, which is an indication of how many people are watching and a little bit of what's happening outside the narrow scope of the stream.

So yeah, it's really hard to talk about this movie because so much happens in it and we never get an explanation for any of it. This is from the director of the brilliant Host, one of if not the best covid-centric horror films, and by following essentially the same format as Host, it manages to also be one of if not the best covid-centric horror films. The characters have even less of an idea that they're in a horror movie than the people in Host did, but all the while something is going on in the background and we have no idea what it is. We never get any clue. It's important that Dashcam goes waaaay beyond the scope of Host and suddenly now we're not just dealing with chairs moving but bloody gore, levitation, creatures, bizarre timewarps, and all of these other things that you would think wouldn't work in a found-footage movie but absolutely, absolutely do. I'm sure the creators of the film had a framework in mind and could offer up a coherent explanation for what was going on, but the scariness of this movie lives in the fact that we don't. We're watching people who are just like us, who are not horror-savvy in the slightest, confronted all of a sudden with something inexplicable. And the way it's presented is incredibly effective. This is an exercise in the art of keeping details from the viewer during a horror movie to create maximum uncertainty and tension.

It's good because it's just so weird. It goes to such weird places. When you see a chair move on its own in a horror movie, it's scary, but your mind immediately goes to one explanation and that's "ghost", right? You can't do that with anything that happens in Dashcam. You have no frame of reference to be like "oh, this must be what's behind all of this". It just keeps getting weirder and harder to define. It's ambitious and judging from a lot of bad reviews it doesn't work for everyone. But it worked for me. This was one of the best movies I've seen all year. Yes, I hated Annie deeply. This movie is so good that it makes that work in its favor. There is so much to talk about here that I could go on even more, but honestly, the longer this review gets, the more self-conscious I feel about praising it so much in the face of some really dismal opinions on letterboxd, so I'll end it here.