Dashcam, review: an angry anti-vaxxer isn’t the horror show this film thinks

Rob Savage’s film simulates a live-stream that turns sinister, but its exhaustingly aggravating lead makes you want to log off

During lockdown, the British director Rob Savage made a splash with the ingenious Host, a laptop-based chiller less than an hour long about a Zoom séance gone horribly wrong – or right, if you took the side of the evil spirits. Made for less than £80,000, it was a model exploitation flick within this voguish format, using every judder of web video to ramp up the anxieties of the Covid age.

Savage’s follow-up, Dashcam, is wilder and weirder, but far less successful. It was allegedly withdrawn from Vue cinemas this week for “offensive content”; the true reasons may be its lack of mainstream audience appeal. The film, shot using a combination of dashcam and iPhone footage, is desperate to seem offensive, yet achieves only a hectic tedium.

Annie Hardy, an “edgy” American performer whose punk ditties include a song called You F–K Like My Dad, plays Annie, an anti-vaxx nightmare who has flown to the UK during Covid times, and presents a live-streamed radio channel while driving her car. For baffling reasons, one night she agrees to ferry an elderly black lady (Angela Enahoro) towards medical help. But there’s something diabolical about this mute crone, who has blood seeping from underneath her mask; this spews out in torrents later on, and a couple of times, she levitates.

Annie is an intentionally aggravating protagonist: her relentless streams of scat-obsessed invective suggest Beavis and Butthead rolled into one couldn’t-care-less female form. But while Hardy has amazing confidence as a screen performer, and is often funny, it’s hard to make horror land when the apparent victim is just enfolding everything you can fling at her into a feature-length stand-up routine.

A lack of rhyme or reason is all part of the film’s punk-rock attitude – it wants to strap us in for a chaotic ride that’s assaultive and bewildering. Yet Savage is cheating with his chosen format. The moment anything obviously supernatural occurs, the live feed on Annie’s show cuts out, which banishes the trolls making moronic, wildly un-PC comments in a chat window displayed on the screen. We’re the only ones who get the full experience, but the pretence that we’re actually watching Annie’s live-streamed ordeal has been unrepentantly broken. Dashcam was produced by Jason Blum – he of the Paranormal Activity, Insidious and Purge franchises – and most of its high budget has clearly been splurged on elaborate practical effects, such as the moment where a stolen car plunges into a river and Annie, to whose head the iPhone is now attached, nearly drowns.

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it; the funniest part is an extended end credits, where Hardy rap-sings her way through the whole cast and crew, rhyming the surnames of all involved with whatever silly filth she can think up. But long before this ridiculous outro, we’ve lost any way of taking Dashcam seriously, or objecting to it more than any other horror flick which misuses an already tired formal gimmick. Such gimmicks have reached a shrugging, not-even-ironic nadir by now, wherein a film such as this has the sloppy cheek to do whatever it pleases.

18 cert, 87 min. In cinemas on Friday