TIFF 2021: Dashcam
tiff 2021While pandemic cinema has become a genre of its own, both in films thematically dealing with the COVID-19 lockdown and in films that had to work around its restrictions, one has stood out from the rest. Rob Savage's Host quietly dropped onto Shudder in the summer of 2020 but quickly grew to become possibly one of the most important and most impressive horror films of the past decade. It was always going to be hard for Savage to follow up a film of this regard and, after just a year, Savage has stepped up to the challenge with Dashcam. Screening as part of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, Dashcam sees LA-based musician and personality Annie Hardy play an exaggerated trump supporting anti-masker version of herself who escapes LA in the middle of lockdown to stay with her former collaborator who goes by Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel) and his girlfriend (Jemma Moore), who are unaware that Hardy is coming. Hardy causes chaos but one night, when playing around with the food delivery service app that Stretch uses, finds herself in a terrifying fight for survival. Despite the excitement for Dashcam, considering it is the same team as Host, the final product is genuinely awful, with the film being one of the biggest disappointments and misfires of the year.
What hits first and never lets up throughout the film's shockingly short 77-minute runtime is simply how annoying it is, specifically with the character of Annie Hardy. The film feels grating with the consistently disgusting displays of humanity it shows in Hardy's live stream – with Hardy herself being a complete misfire character-wise. The last thing any audience would want to experience now is an edgy anti-masker who consistently is trying to make people upset and get on their nerves. While in a few years this might be an interesting reflection, this is still a reality being faced, with many having to risk their lives and plenty having to lose their lives due to idiotic individuals like that highlighted in Dashcam. Even if the film clearly is not on her side, it is a key point of the film that feels not just uncomfortable but downright sickening.
It doesn't help that there is no point to this. There is no lesson learned or grand social commentary found. Instead, the film feels almost exploitive in how it uses this character, consistently raising her persona to greater and greater heights trying to get some sort of shock value in an incredibly unpleasant fashion. The 77-minute runtime isn't shocking because it is clean, but rather because the film feels endless genuinely becoming one of the most painful viewing experiences of the year.
Even the scares of the film are not that impressive. While there is still legitimate technical merit that harkens back to the groundbreaking work of Host, the overall story feels dull. Not only is the audience already disconnected and over the film by the time the true substance of the plot begins, but the film severely lacks a hook and pull to engage the audience. It is fine but, sadly, never feels captivating or memorable. The found-footage gimmick also falls completely flat. While using Zoom in Host was an incredibly clever idea that not only enhanced the terror of the film but also allowed the project to work around various restrictions it faced, the found-footage gimmick of Dashcam feels cheap and distracting. It never becomes a focal point of the story, like in a project such as Spree, and half of the time it simply makes no sense. While it is completely understandable that the film would have to find some way to overcome various restrictions whether that be budget or COVID, this clearly was not the way to go.
As it probably is clear, there is no amount of words to properly express how disappointing Dashcam is. The film wasn't just dull but actively painful to sit through – with almost no redeeming factors. There will be the occasional well-built sequence that will show a distant shadow of the talents found within Host, but the rest of the film is nearly unredeemable. Save yourself and skip this live stream, as it clearly is not worth the time or energy of even sitting through the runtime.
