Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Click here for our continuing coverage of TIFF, and click here for our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
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If you travel in horror circles, you might remember Rob Savage’s Host as a mid-summer present dropped on unsuspecting Shudder audiences in the midst of the pandemic drought. I don’t, because I was totally anemic to the idea of Zoom Cinema despite really enjoying most of the Screen Life stuff I’d seen previously (Unfriended: Dark Web especially), given that the escapism I wanted from that particular moment had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the current moment. So it was with some manner of trepidation that I approached DASHCAM, Savage’s second pandemic-related film, to the point that I wondered aloud what the hell Savage would wind up doing once the COVID crisis finally reaches whatever Bethlehem it is currently slouching towards. From the synopsis, you might think you have this film figured out: It’s another Screen Life picture, albeit one focusing on a live-streamer rather than a video-chatting one, a sort of hybrid Found Footage/Twitch stream. It’s also about the pandemic, somewhat, so you can expect plenty of references to the current moment that we find ourselves in.
What you might not expect is that Savage has made the cinematic equivalent of an Anal Cunt song, to the point that one might imagine Seth Putnam looking up from hell and smiling as he gets his dick sucked by a four-headed demon succubus, bloodstream saturated with all manner of Satan’s most depraved narcotics. It’s almost riotously offensive, gleefully relishing in the often gut-busting humor and heterodox of Annie Hardy (the Giant Drag singer, playing herself), cast here as the live-streamer in question, who improvs raps that her chat suggests while driving around L.A. making a hot mess. She’s in some distress, because the situation, for her, may not be the best, so she packs up her bags and heads to London where she’ll hopefully find some rest and relaxation with one of her former bandmates, though she’s an uninvited guest. Sure enough, the dude’s not content with him crowding her nest, and after an argument puts their friendship to the test, she steals his car and resumes her stream while doing his delivery job as a jest. It’s on a call that she is asked by a random woman to go on a quest, to deliver an older-looking woman named Angela to an unknown address. It’s a bizarre request, but Annie accepts, not realizing that Angela’s condition’s progressed, and this pest doesn’t realize just how much she should be distressed by all this. She hasn’t been blessed, and Angela’s presence isn’t a present. In fact, it’ll lead to death.
Barely over an hour in length, DASHCAM is an abrasive assault on the senses and sensibilities of the kind of person who would have tweeted excitedly about Host when it dropped. It’s a white-knuckle found-footage thriller with a fuckload of truly crazy stunts and scenes, and the comparisons made to Sam Raimi’s work within the TIFF program itself feel one hundred percent apt. The “roller-coaster” cliche is overused at this point (and I partially blame myself for perpetuating that), but it’s more true here than it is to other films applied that moniker’s been applied to in the past, given that it’s all from a (relatively) first-person perspective, placing you in the driver’s seat for all manner of slam-bash chaos as it jumps all over the place. There’s some legitimately incredible work done here, especially some of the later scenes set in a number of cars, where I have no idea how Savage managed to achieve what he did — when a car is straight-up lifted and dropped to the ground, the actors all within, you’ll probably be just as stunned as I was at what you’re watching, especially on what must have been a threadbare budget. This aspect of the film’s construction will surely appeal to the technical-minded horror nerd (if their stomachs can withstand it), but it’s all the other stuff that will most likely make people riotously angry.
Notice I didn’t say “righteously.” Hardy’s on-screen persona, barely altered from her real social-media presence, is a toxic fusion of aggressively right-wing politics and COVID-denialism made all the more caustic by her aggressively profane mode of speaking, and you’d be forgiven for thinking, early on, that the film will want to punish her for her transgressions or beliefs as is the fashion for a lot of supernatural-style slashers. This does not happen, and instead, Savage asks us to spectate, stewing with our judgments, and wants to see if we can find some manner of sympathy for, if not Hardy herself, her predicament. We often tend to hope bad people get their just desserts, and, indeed, the conditions of drama as outlined in Poetics demanded it, to which I imagine Annie Hardy would have probably used as toilet paper had she been given the opportunity to meet Aristotle. But DASHCAM joins films like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in being an exercise in the psychology of the damned, which is infinitely more interesting than whatever petty moralism we want out of genre cinema, especially when it’s a crazy-ass lady flinging absurd rhymes at us like she’s David with a sling-shot machine gun. So, you may not like DASHCAM‘s restrained approach to the politics of its lead or its lack of “meaningful catharsis,” but you might very well be entertained by it regardless. Besides, where are else are you going to hear someone rhyme “Jason Blum” with “cum” outside of the lengthy end credits of this movie? Nowhere, that’s where.