Dashcam (horror film)

Dashcam (stylised in all caps) is a 2021 horror film directed by Rob Savage and written by Savage, Gemma Hurley, and Jed Shepherd. The film stars Annie Hardy, Amer Chadha-Patel, and Angela Enahoro. It follows Hardy as a semi-fictionalized version of herself who leaves Los Angeles to visit a friend in London during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to find herself in a series of nightmarish events after agreeing to give a strange elderly woman a ride in her friend's car.

A screenlife film, Dashcam is presented entirely from the perspective of Hardy's iPhone as she livestreams her actions for viewers. The film was produced by Jason Blum through his company Blumhouse Productions, Savage through his company BOO-URNS, and Douglas Cox through Shadowhouse Films. Savage and Shepherd developed the idea for Dashcam based on Hardy's livestreamed YouTube series Band Car, in which she would work out song ideas in real-time with viewers while driving around Los Angeles. Savage felt the concept would make for a good found footage-style horror film, and ultimately asked Hardy to appear in it.

Dashcam had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was a runner-up for the People's Choice Award: Midnight Madness. It was later released theatrically in the United Kingdom and the United States on 3 June 2022. It received mixed reviews; most viewers praised its scariness and visual format, but felt that Hardy's character was so unlikable that the film came undone.

Plot
Annie Hardy, an American musician and conservative conspiracy theorist, livestreams from her car, creating music using comments from the live chat as lyrics. Tired of pandemic restrictions and homelessness in Los Angeles, she flies to London to visit her friend and former bandmate, Stretch, a food delivery driver. Stretch’s girlfriend, Gemma, clashes with Annie over politics and COVID-19. Annie accompanies Stretch on a delivery job, antagonizing restaurant owners with her anti-mask views.

Returning home, Annie refuses to remove her MAGA hat, prompting Gemma to attack her. Overhearing Gemma urging Stretch to kick her out, Annie steals Stretch’s car and phone and takes a delivery job for him. She arrives at a closed restaurant, but the owner offers her money to transport an elderly woman, Angela, to an address. Angela defacates herself, forcing them to stop at a diner where Annie discovers an Ariana Grande tattoo on Angela’s stomach. A woman enters, looking for Angela, and attacks Annie, who flees the diner with Angela.

Stretch tracks Annie down via the livestream and forces his way into the car. They argue and pull over, and Angela vanishes. Stretch finds her standing atop a tree in a nearby forest, falls trying to reach her, and Angela floats to the ground. The woman from the diner returns with a shotgun and attempts to kill Annie and Stretch, who escape in the car with Angela. They learn that Angela's mouth is stapled shut from under her mask.

Annie and Stretch attempt to flag down a passing car, which hits Stretch. The driver is the woman from the diner, who reveals she is Angela’s mother, revealing that Angela is actually sixteen and shows a photo of her with the same tattoo. Annie tries to drive away in the mother’s car but crashes and is attacked. With Stretch’s help, Annie traps the mother’s arm in the steering wheel and snaps it. Angela appears, rips her mother’s head off, and pursues Annie and Stretch.

Angela chases Annie and Stretch to an abandoned amusement park. There, Angela kills Stretch. Annie escapes in a car, but Angela causes her to crash. Angela pushes the car into a lake with her powers, but Annie traps Angela in the car and escapes. Annie finds a remote house and realizes it’s the destination she was supposed to take Angela. Inside the house, Annie finds occult symbols and cult members who kill themselves. Angela attacks Annie, but Annie kills her with a knife. A creature emerges from Angela’s mouth and chases Annie. Annie kills the creature with her keyboard. She then collapses in Stretch’s car and starts a livestream where she raps about her experiences.

Production
The film was developed by Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd, who initially came up with the idea based on Annie Hardy's series Band Car, livestreamed YouTube videos in which she would work out song ideas while driving around Los Angeles. Savage said, "When [Shepherd] showed me the show, the first conversations were like, 'Oh, that's a cool set-up for a found footage movie.' [...] The version we were taking around pre-Host was very much just using the Band Car set-up, but the idea was to probably take it to studios, to probably try and get an actor to play that role." Savage eventually asked Hardy to star in the film.

Filming took place around Margate in late 2020, with the amusement park scenes shot at Dreamland Margate. Hardy spent her free time during production at the Albion Rooms, a hotel and recording studio owned by The Libertines, where she simultaneously recorded material for her band Giant Drag. To promote the film, Giant Drag released the song "Devil Inside" in June 2022. The song is featured in the film's closing credits.

The film features many references to Savage's previous film, Host (2020), such as viewers in Annie's live chat discussing the astral plane. It also features the primary cast of Host in smaller roles; Jemma Moore plays Stretch's girlfriend Gemma, James Swanton (who portrayed the demon in Host) portrays the monster, Seylan Baxter plays the restaurant owner who tasks Annie with transporting Angela, Haley Bishop's voice is heard as the flight announcer at Los Angeles International Airport, Emma Louise Webb's voice is heard as cabin crew on Annie's flight, and Radina Drandova plays an emergency responder. Caroline Ward and Edward Linard portray newlyweds accidentally killed by Stretch, and their characters die in the same way as their Host characters in a drastically different situation, with Ward dying from blunt force trauma and Linard burning to death.

Release
Dashcam premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival on 13 September 2021. In February 2022, Momentum Pictures purchased the distribution rights for the film.

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 48% based on 86 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10. The critical consensus reads, "Dashcam is visually and thematically provocative, although the film's grating protagonist undercuts its effectiveness." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Clarisse Loughry of The Independent praised the film and said, "[It's] a riot. Sure, it's a film whose spell I can imagine being instantly broken the second you remove it from the precise context it was made forin a cinema, with as large an audience as possible, all of them hooting and holleringbut that should hardly be counted as a mark against it. If anything, it's proof that Savage knows exactly the kind of film he's making. Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality."

Dennis Harvey of Variety gave the film a middling review, noting, "As a showcase for [Hardy], Dashcam may be a little too much of a good thingshe's an acting natural, but this character is so vividly irksome it turns the whole film into a sort of deliberately off-putting standup routine. Dashcam feels longer than the bare 66 minutes it logs pre-final credits. It's a clever stuntstill, not so clever that it can't wear out its welcome."