Mark Reviews Movies: DASHCAM (2022)

Dashcam, Momentum Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

The thing a good number of people will want to see happen in Dashcam doesn't happen. Then again, it's difficult to see a good amount of what is happening in co-writer/director Rob Savage's movie, and that seems an equally significant issue, if not more of one.

The movie, set during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, fashions itself as an almost-continuous act of self-documentation on a cellphone. The camera is stable at times, such as when our protagonist is driving and doing her online performance routine, but it's mostly made up of a lot of handheld-camera shakiness and "spontaneous" moments of stillness, when said camera falls or is dropped at such an angle that we can't make out much of where it is or what's around it—until Savage forces a certain figure or scare, perfectly set within the accidental frame. The technique here, then, is convincing enough that it's regularly irritating, but it's also just precise enough at certain moments to make the whole concept feel fake and staged.

That's one problem. The other major one—beyond the nonsensical nature of its plot, which we can mostly forgive, since the movie is about being thrown into a situation beyond one's control and comprehension—is the lead character. She's named Annie, and Annie, played by Annie Hardy, is even more annoying than the inability to tell what's going on for stretches of the movie. She runs an internet video channel, where she improvises raps based on random words tossed out to her by viewers in the comments.

Annie is also—and more to the misguided point of the movie and the foundation of why she's insufferable—a conspiracy theorist, a political bigot and one regarding lots of other things (immigrants, for example), and a denier of the disease that has spread around the globe and the vaccine that could diminish that disease's impact. Obviously, she has a red hat with a certain nationalist phrase on it, as well as a T-shirt that has the word "liberal" crossed out, and Annie has had more than enough of living in a Los Angeles that's under various lockdown policies and measures of public health.

The impetus for the plot has Annie abandoning the city and the United States in general for a new place, and with this, the screenplay—written by Savage, Gemma Hurley, and Jed Shepherd—shows both its potential cleverness and its actual mistakenness. The gag is that Annie decides to travel to London, where the lockdown and health guidelines would be and are even more offensive to her. In theory, this points to the filmmakers jabbing the character's intelligence, but the whole concept falls flat, if only because someone as obsessed with the conspiracies and the political beliefs she spouts would almost certainly be aware of those measures, even without being in the country.

The whole movie possesses this kind of dissonance, in that it clearly finds Annie obnoxious, distasteful, and/or generally wrong, while also failing to find a sincere, logical, or amusing way to reflect that sentiment. The running joke of the plot is just how much trouble she gets herself into on account of her sense of self-importance, after her friend Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel)—whose existence as her friend makes her seem less of a bigot than the movie asserts she is—kicks her out of his flat and she steals his car.

At first, it's just getting scolded in and booted out of various places for not wearing a face mask. Later, the trouble involves a mysterious woman named Angela (Angela Enahoro), who seems ill and, after someone pays Annie to bring the woman to a certain address, ends up in the backseat of the stolen car. As it turns out, though, the stranger possesses some unspecified supernatural powers of an unknown origin, and she doesn't appreciate Annie keeping her locked up in the car.

The rest is a lot of chasing, plenty of yelling, a good amount of bloody carnage, and even more running and hiding. Again, the movie's perspective is from Annie's cellphone, where a running chat in the corner serves as a distracting commentary. That aesthetic choice renders a lot of the action into a blur of hastily disappearing images, incomprehensible motion while Annie or someone else holding the cellphone flees in terror, and indecipherable obstacles or negative space when someone is hiding or incapacitated.

In that regard, Dashcam is pure, generic formula, which would usually be a criticism. With the movie's stylistic missteps and its mishandling of an intolerable—and intolerant—protagonist, the formula comes as a bit of a relief.

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