Rob Savage’s Dashcam is a found-footage stunt with a Covid-19 hook. At the center of the film is Annie Hardy, played by the real-life L.A. musician of the same name as the worst version of herself. Hardy, lead vocalist of the band Giant Drag, is an anti-vaxxer, at least as indicated by her Twitter feed and online videos, and in Savage’s follow-up to Host we watch as her character livestreams her way through an onslaught of terror in the outskirts of London, all the while making her Covid-denying thoughts explicitly and loudly heard.
As in real life, Annie runs the improvised music show Band Car, where she freestyles vulgar rhymes based off of viewer comments. Shown entirely through the perspective of her initially mounted phone camera, Dashcam provides viewers with queasily intimate front-row seat to a young woman’s alt-right lunacy, such as comparing pandemic restrictions to Nazi Germany.
Sick of California’s public health measures, Annie decides to take her act to England. And after paying a surprise visit to the home of her old friend and bandmate, Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), she sets out to harass everyone she comes across, which includes being thrown out of a restaurant for refusing to wear a mask. At another point, she naturally dons a MAGA hat.
Dashcam’s real-time progression, beyond keeping things moving, is clever for the way that it allows the comments from the people engaging in Band Car’s sidebar chat to serve as a commentary on the proceedings. After being kicked out of his house by his “virtue signaling” girlfriend (Jemma Moore), Annie decides to mess with her friend’s work situation by stealing his car and driving it to a restaurant where he’s called for a food delivery. There, the eerily empty establishment’s owner (Seylan Baxter) pleads with her to give a visibly sick Black woman, Angela (Angela Enohoro), a ride that Annie will soon come to regret.
By this point, the stage would appear to be perfectly set for our protagonist’s toxic worldview to be spectacularly challenged, but the filmmakers disappointingly jettison any intimations of pandemic horror. Much of this stretch of Dashcam is sufficiently unnerving, mostly for the way that Angela appears and reappears throughout at random. But for a film that goes to such obvious lengths to put a MAGA troll through the wringer, it never feels less than discordant that the big bad turns out to be a malevolent supernatural force.
Because Dashcam doesn’t engage with Annie’s worldview beyond its capacity for crass humor, it only raises all sorts of questions about why it’s even centered around such a toxic firebrand in the first place. Perhaps the filmmakers set out to have audiences question their allegiance for this type of person as she cheekily parrots the scolding phrases of the left back at her terrorizers. But there comes a point where “Put on your mask, bitch!” just feels like a call for audience participation and nothing else. Of course, you could say that Dashcam is nothing if not consistent, as it’s every bit the empty provocation as the troll at its center.
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