With this bold and provocative second feature, British director Rob Savage continues to build on his reputation for low-budget horror films with Covid-19 pandemic angles. Last year’s ingenious Zoom-call shocker Host earned him a three-picture deal with US genre stable Blumhouse, the first of which is this timely gross-out comic-horror mash-up. Mostly shot on smartphones, Dashcam is a “found footage” experiment which riffs on anti-vaccine paranoia, lockdown anxiety and Trump-style online outrage. There are knowing allusions here to The Blair Witch Project, but also echoes of feted splatterpunk maestros like Ben Wheatley, Edgar Wright, Sam Raimi, and the young Peter Jackson.
A lean 77 minutes in length, Dashcam was partly improvised and shot by its cast around a skeletal plotline. Musician Annie Hardy (of Los Angeles indie-grunge band Giant Drag and others) plays a comically exaggerated version of her true off-screen self as a profane, chaotic, hedonistic troublemaker who unwittingly finds herself doing battle with dark forces in the depths of the English countryside. The audacious mix of fact and fiction feels like a guerrilla stunt in places, but there is wit and sophistication at work behind the ragged, anarchic surface. Festival screenings in London and Toronto earned generally positive reviews, although the casting of politically incorrect contrarian Hardy and her flippant attitude to the pandemic is proving contentious. Even so, Savage’s tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy hybrid should find a keen audience among genre fans and curious cult movie buffs.
As in real life, Hardy’s caustically funny anti-heroine hosts a livestream online show in which she drives around LA freestyling rap lyrics full of vulgar rhymes and graphic sexual humour. A Trump-supporting anti-vaxxer who believes Covid restrictions are a shadowy government plot, she flees to Britain in search of less stringent rules. Arriving unannounced on the doorstep of former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel) and his wary girlfriend Gemma (Jemma Moore), the relentlessly obnoxious Hardy soon outstays her welcome. Kicked out onto the street, she retaliates by stealing Stretch’s car and hijacking his job as a freelance food delivery driver.
Following a creepy encounter in a locked-down restaurant, Hardy reluctantly agrees to drive a sick stranger home, but things turn weird when her semi-comatose passenger Angela (Angela Enahoro) starts to leak blood and bodily fluids. It appears that Angela is possessed by some kind of demonic entity, who is able to defy gravity and outrun a speeding car. The plot then accelerates into a deranged rollercoaster ride of chases, ambushes and jump scares, which Annie livestreams via her phone and dashboard camera, blithely greeting each new gory twist with sarcastic jokes and improvised raps.
Many reviewers have slammed Dashcam for giving Hardy a platform to spout her Covid-denying, liberal-baiting opinions. Savage defends his casting decision, stressing that the real Hardy is much less abrasive than her exaggerated screen persona. Crucially, the fictionalised version is obviously a grotesque parody of anti-vaxxer types, a gratingly unsympathetic diva whose selfish disregard for basic safety rules has lethal consequences for almost everybody she meets. It is hard to imagine anybody taking this amusingly vile shock-jock caricature too seriously, least of all Hardy herself.
Political objections aside, Dashcam is frequently a confusing visual experience. The hand-held phone-cam aesthetic is cleverly sustained by Savage and his team, but this means much of their shaky footage is shot in low light and hectic circumstances, with crucial scenes of bloody carnage unfolding in a blurry, chaotic rush. The lack of any explanatory back story or firm narrative resolution will also leave some viewers feeling short-changed..
But taken on its own terms as a punky, adrenalised, irreverent joyride of a movie, Dashcam is consistently engaging and hilarious. A reliably spiky source of bad-taste humour and bad-ass mischief, Hardy is more asset that liability, particularly during an extended coda sequence in which she breaks the fourth wall to rap the film’s credits, complete with foul-mouthed insults and improvised scatological rhymes. The “live” viewer comments that scroll on-screen alongside her hair-raising antics are also a smart touch, peppered with funny lines and in-jokes that will repay close attention on home entertainment formats.
Director: Rob Savage
Screenplay: Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
Cast: Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro, Jemma Moore, Seylan Baxter
Producers: Jason Blum, Douglas Cox, Rob Savage
Editing: Brenna Rangott
Production companies: Blumhouse Productions (US), Shadowhouse Films (UK), Boo-Urns (UK)
World sales: Blumhouse Productions
Venue: BFI London Film Festival (Cult section)
In English
77 minutes
