‘This is fucking insane…’
Loads of people tried to create art either about or during the global pandemic. British director Rob Savage arguably had the most success in this area with his breakout smash hit Host. That film, told entirely through a Zoom call, managed to harness our collective anxieties about a world gone to shit. Dashcam followed a year later, and boy is this movie fucking nuts…
In real life, Annie Hardy is a musician and actress known primarily for her work with her band Giant Drag. During the pandemic, she started live blogging herself making up songs on the spot in her car whilst driving around the deserted streets of Los Angeles. Savage was inspired by this to create Dashcam – a film in which Hardy plays a distorted MAGA hat version of herself arriving in England during lockdown to escape America’s strict COVID prevention laws. She soon discovers that a global pandemic is the least of her worries.
I will start off by saying that Dashcam is not an enjoyable movie. It’s panic-attack-inducing. There was never a moment in which I didn’t feel on edge. The persona that Hardy creates here is utterly despicable and it is clear that Savage has spent enough time online to know what a troll sounds like. Throughout the film, comments from supposed live streamers scroll across the screen, perfectly capturing the unhinged and toxic nature of internet speak. It’s terrifying. Is this a good performance from Hardy? It’s difficult to say. It’s definitely committed. But it’s also tonally inconsistent and incredibly annoying. Obviously, that’s the point, but what is the audience actually gaining from this experience other than wide-eyed lunacy and ongoing anxiety?
Dashcam is an obnoxious, unlikeable film, not unlike Beau is Afraid, and while there are some inventive visual set pieces and plenty of scares, I would never dream of sitting through this car crash again. A deeply strange cinematic experience.