Dashcam (stylized 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 polarized reviews; most viewers praised its scariness and visual format, but felt that Hardy's character was so unlikable that the film came undone.
Annie Hardy is an American musician and right-wing conspiracy theorist who livestreams from her car, where she makes music in real-time using comments from the live chat as lyrics. Tired of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and homelessness in Los Angeles, she books a flight to London to pay a visit to her English friend and former bandmate Stretch, who now works as a food delivery driver. Stretch is initially pleased to reunite with Annie, but his girlfriend Gemma almost instantly clashes with her over COVID-19 and politics. Annie accompanies Stretch on a delivery job, frustrating him and antagonizing restaurant owners with her anti-mask views.
Returning home, Annie refuses to take off her MAGA hat, prompting a furious Gemma to attack her. Overhearing Gemma telling Stretch to kick her out, Annie steals Stretch's car and phone before taking a delivery job for him, which she intends to eat herself. When she arrives at the restaurant, she finds it closed, but the owner offers her a lot of money to transport a frail elderly woman named Angela to a particular address. Annie reluctantly accepts and begins driving with Angela until Angela soils herself, forcing them to stop at a diner. While cleaning Angela off in the restroom, Annie discovers an Ariana Grande tattoo on her stomach. A woman enters the diner looking for Angela and attacks Annie, but Annie fends her off and witnesses Angela exhibiting supernatural powers. She flees back to the car.
Stretch, having tracked Annie down via the livestream, forces his way into the car before they are both unnerved by Angela suddenly appearing inside. As they drive away, Stretch and Annie get into an argument and pull over. Angela vanishes and Stretch ventures into the nearby forest to find her standing atop a tree, from which he falls while trying to reach her before she floats to the ground. The woman from the diner returns with a shotgun and attempts to kill Annie and Stretch. They escape in the car with Angela. Annie takes off Angela's face mask to discover that her mouth has been stapled shut. Angela rips the staples off and attempts to bite Annie, distracting Stretch, who crashes into another car and kills the two newlyweds inside. Angela attacks Annie and Stretch, again showing supernatural abilities before disappearing.
Annie and Stretch attempt to flag down a passing car, which hits Stretch. The shotgun-wielding woman exits the car and reveals herself to be Angela's mother who is attempting to track her down. Meanwhile, the livestream goes viral and a horde of viewers enters the chat. Annie attempts to drive away in Angela's mother's car but gets shot at, crashes the car, and is attacked. With the help of Stretch, Annie traps Angela's mother's arm in the steering wheel and snaps it. Angela's mother explains that Angela is actually 16 years old, which Annie laughs off until she sees a recent photo of a young Angela with the Ariana Grande tattoo on her stomach. Angela appears, rips her mother's head off, and pursues Annie and Stretch.
The pair seek refuge in an abandoned amusement park, but Angela quickly hunts them down and kills Stretch. Annie escapes and drives away in another car, only for Angela to catch up to her on foot and cause her to crash. Angela breaks into the car and uses her powers to push it into a lake. Annie traps Angela in the car and escapes, collapsing on the shore, while Angela levitates out of the water behind her. Annie finds an abandoned house in a remote location and makes her way inside, where she celebrates her victory over Angela but soon realises she is at the address to which she was instructed to take Angela. She flees but stumbles across occult symbols and cult members who slit their throats simultaneously before she is attacked by Angela, whom she kills with a knife. A slug-like humanoid creature bursts out of Angela's mouth and chases Annie, who flees into a tunnel, where she finds Stretch's car among other wrecked vehicles. She beats the creature to death with her keyboard.
Annie collapses into Stretch's car and the livestream, which lost connection at various points, starts up again. As viewers return to the chat, Annie starts to rap about her experiences. Some time later, having returned home to Los Angeles, she breaks the fourth wall by improvising a rap about the film's crew as the credits roll.
Band Car, Hardy's YouTube series that served as inspiration for the film
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.[2] 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."[2] Savage eventually asked Hardy to star in the film.[2]
Filming took place around Margate in late 2020,[2][3] with the amusement park scenes shot at Dreamland Margate.[3] 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.[3] To promote the film, Giant Drag released the song "Devil Inside" in June 2022.[4] The song is featured in the film's closing credits.[4]
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.
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."[7] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[8]
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 for—in a cinema, with as large an audience as possible, all of them hooting and hollering—but 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."[9]
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 thing—she'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 stunt—still, not so clever that it can't wear out its welcome."[10]
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