Dashcam (Rob Savage, 2021)

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Host dropped without anyone having heard of it prior. Shudder, AMC's streaming service dedicated to horror with the exclusive rights to the film, started promoting it heavily. In those first few days, the predominant reaction just to the concept, before many had seen the film, was one of exasperation or mild annoyance. A horror film shot entirely from the perspective of a Zoom conference, which takes place during the pandemic we were all still quarantined in, seemed a little much, a little too soon. Essentially, the attitude was, "A Zoom found footage movie, about quarantine in the middle of the quarantine? This is a little too topical and these laptop/tech found footage movies are usually pretty terrible." Within a few days though, word of mouth started to get around, suggesting Host was something special. 

It is something special. Filmed during quarantine, it's a sixty minute shot of unbridled low budget creativity, straight into the vein. The writing is strong, the performances are strong, the in camera effects (all done in the separate locations, largely assembled by the cast) are truly spooky. It's a genuine creeptastic thrill ride. It ended up being exactly the movie we needed during the COVID quarantine. It's a film that takes place during quarantine, but it's not a film about quarantine. It's something altogether different, and expertly crafted. It's the kind of sensation many fans live for within the world of horror cinema. 

Jump to 2021, and as the film festival circuit started to open following the end of the first quarantine, writer/director Rob Savage, along with writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd (the same creative team from Host) started getting opportunities to screen their new screen life/found footage film, Dashcam. Reactions were polarized from the start. On one end of the spectrum there were viewers responding to it as one of the most fun theater experiences they'd had in years, and a cinematic experience not to be missed. On the other end of the spectrum were viewers who found the lead performance by Annie Hardy, and her character, named Annie Hardy, so insufferable, they just couldn't enjoy anything else about the film. 

Annie Hardy, is a livestreamer, with a channel dedicated to improvised musical programming. She drives around, with a synthesizer, and makes up songs based on suggestions from her audience, to preprogrammed beats. She's a rabid pro-Trump personality, a COVID truther and one of the more annoying human beings I've ever seen as the protagonist in a feature length film. She's also an all around narcissist. She has absolutely no concern for the way her actions are affecting anyone around her. There is possibly nothing to like about Annie Hardy in Dashcam, though there is a "watching a train wreck" quality of voyeuristic sensation to following her. Attempting to escape the quarantines in the US, Hardy decides to go to England, and surprise and old friend with a visit. Things only get weirder from there. 

Questions about Shepherd choosing Hardy for the lead, who is barely any different from the person she plays in the film, started almost immediately. First was the question of giving this much attention to someone whose entire internet presence was dedicated to spreading disinformation about COVID and the quarantine. Second, was the question about the wisdom of putting such an unlikeable character at the center of the film. 

It makes sense within the context of the film itself, and what Savage is trying to do with Dashcam, in the context of the found footage/screen life genre. Possibly more than any other genre of film, found footage horror has to be designed as an experience. In a way, it's has to be designed like an amusement park attraction, even more than horror films relying on conventional narrative format. It has to provide scares and/or something to contribute to the atmosphere/creep factor at certain intervals throughout, and it has to up the ante as it continues. Savage and company demonstrated an expert grasp of this with Host. 

With Dascham, they are bringing that same finely tuned sense of designing the experience, and making a major part of that experience an all out assault on the senses. It really is a unique experience and they have designed it to near perfection. There are some high quality scares in this film, a few sequences which are supremely creepy, and all of it comes at a pace which barely gives the audience time to catch their breath. 

This is where casting Annie Hardy to essentially play herself comes in. Annie is another variety of assault, but instead of being an assault to the senses, she's an assault on the audience sensibilities. It would be easy to write this off as Shepherd and company reaching for the low hanging fruit of using purposeful, bluntly stupid provocation in some juvenile sense of rebellion, but considering how well this film is made and thought through, this seems like a more self satisfying answer than the evidence suggests. When we're introduced to Hardy in the first twenty or so minutes of the film, any relatively decent person is going find her presence and her actions assaultive. It's not just her embrace of COVID conspiracies, it's her general countenance and the way she interacts with people around her. If anything, Hardy can be seen as Dashcam's creative team making a statement about the ugliness of this specific variety of American, by relying on her to be an assault on the sensibilities of most audiences. Hardy is a walking, screeching meme of relentless bullshit and privileged sensitivity/insensitivity. Savage, Hurley and Shepherd are all British, and if they were looking for someone to be an ugly American, during the pandemic, they couldn't have found a better representation than Hardy. This is an unwell character. Maybe not in the sense of being mentally ill in the conventional sense, but unwell in the sense we as a nation are grappling with on a much larger scale, the refusal to acknowledge to existence of a reality beyond that which is ideologically constructed and comfortable. 

There is one common complaint about found footage films, the "Why are they still filming?" question, Hardy being the protagonist solves this on the basis of her character's narcissism alone. It is absolutely believable this person could have the hand they are holding the phone in cut off, and one of their first reactions would be to pick up the phone in the other hand. 

While we may have no sympathy for Hardy, and many a long time horror audience member are are going to be gleefully awaiting Hardy's dispatch by the evil lurking in Dashcam's plot, her friend Stretch is the character we feel sympathy for. Amar Chadha-Patel is excellent as Stretch, a man pulled into the insanity of Dashcam by Hardy, and the first horrors it has to put him through come from her and the way she treats him and his life in England. We hope Stretch will be our hero and survivor, but he's stuck on this ride with Hardy. Without Stretch to be our moral center, this film loses a lot of its power, but Chadha-Patel is strong enough to carry that weight. Without Hardy, Stretch never ends up in this insane scenario. Without Stretch, all there is in the film is to root for Hardy to be gruesomely murdered. It's not a mistake that Stretch is a much more sympathetic character, and there is room to read this film as a comment on how the rest of us are being dragged into madness specifically because of the tolerance and civility we're extending to what amounts to narcissism en masse. 

 Dashcam is bold in its unadulterated approach. Hardy is unadulterated, and assaults the sensibilities from the first few minutes, but when the horror of the film begins, it is also unadulterated and it escalates with each new escalation of the scares and advancement of the plot. Visually, aurally, stylistically, this escalating assault is delirium inducing. Savage and company show Host was no fluke. Dashcam is extremely well designed, and while it holds steady to a number of the conventions of the found footage genre, the sheer ecstatic energy of it is a break with the rules. It's perfectly timed for maximum effect at each new incident of horror and each new escalation. Where so many found footage films rely on slow building dread and a creeping atmosphere of psychological terror, Dashcam is designed to jolt the audience into that sense of dread and terror, and it does it incredibly well. When it explodes into manic energy, it is utterly relentless until the last credits roll. The dedication to its approach, along with the strength of the craft it takes to do all of this so successfully is admirable. 

Viewers who are prone to motion sickness might have a bit of trouble with some of it, as it does present a number of sequences where one character or another is sprinting, full out, while holding a phone or having the phone attached to their person somehow. This is another part of that assault though. These moments, with characters running full bore, the screen bouncing in what seems like an uncontrollable amusement park ride, about to go off the rails. 

Whether or not viewers are going to find Dashcam as fun and enjoyable as it is capable of being is going to come down to their perspective on Annie Hardy though. It's not hard to see why there was such a distinct schism in the reactions to the film. She is one of the more detestable protagonists in a long time. At best, she's kind of pathetic, and maybe there'd be some sense of sympathy for the loneliness she's experiencing in quarantine if every single opportunity she gets, she wasn't being a narcissistic asshole to everyone she encounters. If anything, there's a sense that she's feeling this loneliness because she doesn't have anyone to bully or mistreat. She's a void of performative, attention seeking assholery. 

That said, for anyone who can stomach Annie, there is a whole lot about Dashcam to like and admire. It can be one hell of a fun ride, if you accept the premise that the horrific and terror filled world of a horror movie maybe shouldn't just be something only characters we like have to endure, and that there is something realistic in the idea that these things would also happen to horrible people, and sometimes, they're going to be the main character, instead of being a minor supporting character you're rooting to see meet their final end in a horrible way. 

In a way, making the protagonist someone this unlikeable gets straight at one of the common threads of criticism about horror films. One of the common criticisms has been that since the nineties or early aughts, there has been a larger share of horror films (most specifically and Dashcam isn't a slasher, at all) with central characters who are either somewhat unlikeable or underdeveloped, giving the audience nothing about them to care about. There's a variety of perspective suggesting just lining up characters whose entire point of existence is for audiences to root for their bloody dispatch isn't a good thing. At the same time, there's a certain perspective now gaining ground which suggests films generally, should only have likable, decent people as the protagonists. Portraying flawed protagonists in a way that treats them as if their humanity is worth recognizing gets portrayed as "normalizing" or "glamorizing" whatever it is that makes the character flawed. And still, there's another perspective (generally from people who just don't like horror films) which is a dislike for seeing characters a viewer or an audience member does care about being put through whatever horrific scenario the film has in store. 

All of these things taken together though, are a no man's land. If a horror film shouldn't haven unlikable characters because it's perverse for audiences to want to root for their gore soaked deaths, but it's also not good to have characters who are likable, because it's perverse to have to see decent people we care about put through the events horror depicts, where does that leave us? Take it a step further, and portraying characters realistically, as flawed human beings who at times are going to say and do things which aren't good or right and who have the same prejudices, blind spots, and everything else that makes it hard for us to live together is "toxic," then exactly what kinds of characters is anyone supposed to be able to tell stories about? What kind of stories are they supposed to be able to tell, within that framework?