TIFF 2021 Film Review: DASHCAM
Rob Savage’s DASHCAM is bigger - but certainly not better - than Host
My TIFF 2021 coverage starts here! Kicking off this year’s Midnight Madness slate is Rob Savage’s followup to his 2020 “screenlife” hit, Host. Extrapolating COVID found footage beyond just a Zoom lobby, DASHCAM doubles down on pandemic horror to very mixed results. Ramping up the scope and intricacy - but not the ingenuity - of Host, the film gets wildly uneven mileage out of its grating protagonist and its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink terrors. Minor spoilers ahead…
In April of 2020, in the midst of our very first COVID lockdown, filmmaker Rob Savage uploaded a two-minute snippet of a Zoom call to Twitter; in the short clip, he pranks his friends by splicing footage of him investigating a noise in his attic with a jump scare from 2007’s Spanish horror film, REC. The prank soon went viral, and a little over three months later, Host was born. Expanding his idea to a brisk 56-minute feature, Host struck pangs of pandemic familiarity, but it also provided a clever, chilling escape in the form of a gumptious found footage film. Fast-forward to 2021, and Savage - along with writing partners Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd - is once again regaling us with COVID-era horror; where his previous film was an intimate, small-scale haunting across laptop screens, DASHCAM goes bigger and badder, taking the footage on the road in a bloody and boisterous homage to “splatstick.”
DASHCAM is framed by the fictional app Band Car, which streams musicians from the front seats of their cars. Annie Hardy (playing a wildly caricatured version of herself) is a noxious, right-wing, pandemic-denying troll, and certainly quite a choice for the film’s protagonist. Tired of lockdown in America, she packs up her phone (and her proud, red MAGA hat), and jets off to London to reunite with an old bandmate, Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), now a delivery driver. It isn’t long before Annie’s abrasive personality instigates a fight between Stretch and his girlfriend (a blink and you’ll miss it cameo from Host star Jemma Moore), and she takes the opportunity to steal his car. Through a series of hilariously overwrought antics, Annie ends up receiving a giant wad of cash in exchange for driving a mysterious, sickly old woman (Angela Enahoro) to a rural address. It doesn’t take long for Annie to figure out that her passenger is much, much more than she bargained for.
When Host was released a year ago, we were in the throes of our very first quarantine. The film showed up right as our first bout of lockdown fatigue kicked in, using the familiarity of our tired Zoom screens as a form of frightening escapism. Host was early in the first wave of pandemic filmmaking - it was fun, refreshing, and cathartic. One year later in the never-ending COVID catastrophe, and DASHCAM - with its thoroughly detestable, anti-vax, anti-mask protagonist - hits differently. DASHCAM’s Annie Hardy is a woeful caricature that sits a little too close to reality, and even with the handful of laughs wrung from Hardy’s pure commitment to the bit, the character - and much of the film - feels tired and unpalatable. As the bodies start piling up, there’s a fascinating commentary that forms around how the worst people can typically flout consequences the longest, but Annie is afforded no interiority to explore this further. You can only hear the phrase “Shit on my balls!” so many times before your eyes - and ears - start glazing over.
Even DASHCAM’s scares are flaccid compared to the Zoom-based ingenuity of Host. Angela Enahoro’s deft physical performance - along with a flood of blood, feces, and other fluids - puts some gas in the tank, but gone are the clever and creative tricks of its predecessor. It also doesn’t help that DASHCAM’s final act is largely rushed nonsense. With an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, there are glimpses of demons? Aliens? Cults? Admittedly, there’s some great, genuinely scary imagery that can compete with some of the best the found footage genre can offer, and there might be a cool horror mythology to be teased from these disparate pieces, but the film cuts itself off before we can peek behind its curtains. DASHCAM’s patchwork set-pieces, outlandish gore, and gross-out moments might tide Midnight Madness crowds over, but it’s mostly disappointing because I know Rob Savage and his team are capable of much, much more.
