Dashcam (2021)

June 3, 2022 3:31 PM

At the start of the pandemic, an obnoxious livestreaming improv musician (Annie Hardy, playing an exaggerated version of herself) abandons L.A. for London, steals her ex-bandmate's car, fires up her livestream and makes the fateful decision to give a ride to an elderly woman who is not what she seems. Filmed entirely via iPhone. Written and directed by Rob Savage (Host).

Currently playing in selected cinemas. Also available for digital rental on multiple outlets.

Sitting at 48% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

posted by DirtyOldTown (2 comments total)

How you feel about this film is going to be largely dependent on how you feel about the main character, who is essentially an IRL troll, the kind of person who makes jokes about incest fucking her dad and eating at "a butt buffet." She's a terrible human being but in a very Gen X scumbag provocateur kind of way.

If you can accept that the film doesn't condone her or her behavior, it just seizes on her as a memorably chaotic protagonist, the you will be fine. If you need your main characters to either be likable or definitively satirized, this is going to rub you the wrong way for sure.

She's seen rapping about how the vaccines are fake in one scene and putting on a literal MAGA hat in another. If that makes you nope on out, I get that.

But the film sincerely isn't about her politics, not even to satirize them. She's just foul-mouthed and chaotic and that makes her journey wilder and crazier than it might be.

As for the film around her, like Host, it's a sneakily virtuosic found footage fun fest, simultaneously always seeming to be off the cuff made up and following an arc and getting the great shots, again and again.

Recommend seeing with at least three other people and copious amounts of alcohol.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:38 PM on June 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

'Host' was much better than it needed to be. I will watch this.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:23 PM on June 4, 2022 [1 favorite]