There’s one obstacle in the audience’s suspension of disbelief that every found footage horror film either grapples with or fully ignores at some point: why are these characters still filming? The genre’s first mainstream hit, The Blair Witch Project, committed to the idea of a lost tape from aspiring documentarians. The protagonist, Heather, finds herself spiraling into an obsessive need to capture these horrific moments on camera to find some sort of meaning in her fear. While there have been some creative solutions to this conundrum here and there, last year’s Spree innovated as it merged those same destructive impulses with a cautionary tale of the realities of online virality. Enter Rob Savage’s newest Midnight Madness offering, Dashcam, which continues the “worst side of the internet” terror that Spree started, this time in the height of last year’s COVID lockdown.
While Savage’s previous film, Host, found its horror in the relatable confines of a group of friends and their isolated Zoom call, Dashcam places us in the audience of an irony poisoned right-winger’s livestream. The film’s cold open introduces us to our obnoxious and abrasive lead Annie Hardy, who blurs the lines between reality and fiction as she plays a fictionalized parody of herself. While hosting her freestyle rap show “Band Car, the Internet’s #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast From a Moving Vehicle,” she breaks COVID restrictions to crash the London home of her former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), much to the dismay of his girlfriend (Jemma Moore). After being kicked out from her uninvited stay, she decides to steal Stretch’s car in retaliation. Along the way, she’s bribed to escort a mysterious old woman, Andrea (Angela Enahoro), to an address in the countryside, unknowingly embarking into a long night of strange, unexplainable terrors.
Many critics have already voiced disdain for Annie’s loud, mean-spirited energy, and while I understand the concern over giving a figure like her a platform, I also admire how Dashcam’s social media framing device purposely grounds her lack of coherence. Annie is a cartoonesque level of absurd. As she flashed her MAGA hat and crudely rapped about how COVID is a hoax, I switched back and forth on whether she was doing an elaborate bit, or if it still mattered as she nonchalantly joked her way through every threat on her path. Dashcam is an endlessly frustrating watch, and purposefully so — which is a difficult line that I found Savage tread well most of the time.
Early on in the film, Annie has a public meltdown while picking up a delivery order in a restaurant without a mask. After taunting the cashier enough times, he instinctively pulls down his own mask to tell her to leave the establishment. Annie rejoices, for her whole entire worldview banks on the slip of his mask. To him, it’s an accidental impulse. To her, it’s the hypocritical validation she needs. If you doomscroll Twitter as much as I do, you probably have seen similar videos of “Karens” disturbing the peace at grocery stores and restaurants. Despite everyone else telling them they are wrong, their ability to victimize themselves gives them all the satisfaction they need. It’s an endless paradox, and a fitting cold open into the downward spiral of madness that ensues later on.
That hunger for validation is why throughout all the Evil Dead-style monsters she finds, Annie will keep recording and performing. In fact, her performance is likely the only thing driving her in the last act of the film. She didn’t come to London for growth or belonging. The film opens with her as a lonely, pathetic loser in front of an enabling audience, and she ends the film satisfied with being even lonelier and pathetic. The final moments of Dashcam are disturbing not because of gnarly gore and destruction, but because there remains a smug look on Annie’s face as heart emojis flood the screen. The worst person alive survived a gaze into hell, and their only way of describing it is with adrenochrome and cabals. Savage’s sophomore pandemic themed horror is trashy and deeply unlikeable, but it serves as a sickly look into modern digital conservatism.
