Dashcam (2021): A Conversational Critique

Tags

Annie Hardy, Dashcam 2021, film critique, found footage horror, horror movie review, pandemic movies, Rob Savage, Starz

Here’s the transcript of my latest unscripted audio essay. I’m talking about the polarizing found-footage horror of Rob Savage’s Dashcam (2021). Bypassing the surface-level gore, I compare the film to a mirror of collective pandemic trauma. I explore the character of Annie as a metaphor for an indifferent, unchanged public, read the antagonist Angela as the personification of the virus, and discuss the broken social contract felt by me as an immunocompromised person during lockdown.

You can read here, or scroll down to listen on YouTube.

There’s a new age belief that everyone you see around you is sort of you pushed out. I don’t believe that, because that would mean that everyone around me wasn’t real and they were a figment of my imagination—which is something from one of my worst acid trips (which I would never do, I would never take acid), but from one of my worst acid trips. What I can buy is that the way that you perceive people has something to do with you more than them.

That’s why I was surprised that I got all the way through this movie Dashcam (2021). I know there’s two Dashcammovies, but this is the one about a streamer who is not quite terminally obnoxious. Her name is Annie. She’s improvising music while driving around in her car, gets bored, and flies to England. She breaks into an old friend’s house, steals his car, and takes over his DoorDash order because he’s lost his job due to COVID. She ends up taking cash to transport an old lady who has every bodily fluid leaking out of her to an address.

The synopsis will tell you it’s about two friends on a road trip as a found footage movie, but her friend Stretch is not a willing participant in the road trip. He tracks her down because she’s stolen his car. Then, every time you think that you’ve seen probably the most disgusting and appalling thing you’ve ever seen in a film, they come up with another one.

I was watching this in the middle of the afternoon. It’s not my type of movie; I am not the target audience. Yet I couldn’t turn it off, and I somehow knew in my heart that there wouldn’t be a resolution. That’s what I’m always hoping for—something ambiguous. But this is a disgusting film. It’s about people who deny COVID. At first, I thought the old lady (the primary antagonist) was the vulnerable population that’s most likely to get COVID, but I think maybe her name is Angela, and maybe Angela is COVID. This character Annie—the COVID denier, the MAGA mask-hole, COV-idiot—represents the people who went through the pandemic and now that we’ve come out the other side, they don’t seem to be changed in any way. If they’re not dead, if they didn’t lose anyone close to them, they’re not affected and they’re going on.

I was forced to take a sociology class at one of the colleges I went to before I graduated because I kept changing schools, and when you do that, they change your core classes. I found out in 2000 or 2001, when I was taking this sociology class, that there had been a pandemic in 1918 and everyone just kind of forgot about it. The same thing has happened again, and believe me, even I’ve almost forgotten about it.

I was in active cancer treatment during the pandemic. They say this movie Dashcam is about when people finally burst out of being on lockdown and were happy to get back with other people. I was like: “The hell with all of y’all, you didn’t try to protect me, I don’t want to be around you.” I’ve really still isolated myself. I go to the gym, and I go to restaurants and movies. But yesterday I was at the doctor, and the receptionist was coughing and wearing a mask. It was the eye doctor. I got through the eye doctor appointment, and the people working on me didn’t seem to be sick. But then I came out, and the woman that was going to try to sell me glasses was sniffling too. I just said, “I’ll take this paper prescription and I’ll go.” It’s really just right there beneath the surface for me to cut and run.

Having PTSD from the pandemic—obviously I’m self-diagnosing, but I’m still ready to run out of a building, it’s right there—that’s why I was so surprised that I enjoyed this movie. I could not believe how much I enjoyed it. Annie Hardy is a “filth wizard,” to paraphrase that old show Black Books. The words that were coming out of her… I think she really is a musician that improvises, and I was pretty impressed. It was pretty funny, the things that she was saying and the way that she kept up her running patter. She says that the version of her in the movie is exaggerated, that it’s not really her.

A couple days ago, I answered a call to action on Facebook from somebody who was trying to rehome a cat. Their neighbor had abandoned a cat, and they had someone in the home that couldn’t be around a cat, so they were begging for anyone to take it. It’s a small town I live in, so this was a friend of a friend. I went and got the cat. I’m sitting here in the room with the cat, who has not warmed up to my other two cats and thinks that she lives in my bedroom now and likes me. But after I was done getting the rescued cat, I thought: I just went in and sat in a stranger’s living room and chatted with her for 20 or 30 minutes. In 2023, I wouldn’t have been able to do that yet. I was still going around in a mask for half the year until I finally did get COVID in 2023.

Basically, at that point with all the vaccinations that I’d had, it was a sore throat—the worst sore throat I’ve ever had. I called the doctor’s office, and the doctor himself called me back. They watch me real carefully because I’m a cancer patient. He was like, “Take some ibuprofen, you dumbass, or you’re going to have to go to the hospital if your throat closes up.” And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know I could take ibuprofen, I thought I would bleed to death.” The medical anxiety is real; it’s still there. But even I, who have been the worst about isolating, am coming through it. I’m not going to forget like this metaphorical, ridiculous person in this film, but I think it’s all going to fade eventually.

I don’t know what to make of that, because none of it made sense in real life. It’s never going to make sense. We’re not going to know what actually happened, and whatever people’s reaction to it was, was however they reacted to this terrible trauma. For some people, it was to go out and make a movie like Dashcam. I’m fascinated with the whole subgenre of films and TV that were made during the pandemic. I’d like to see the human ingenuity that took place. I think you could do a whole series on films that came out during that time. When the film started up from the description, if I had read that it was “COVID: The Movie,” I wouldn’t have even watched it. But it was like, oh, found footage and supernatural horror? Well, I couldn’t click on that fast enough. I don’t like to recommend things, but I’m going to recommend that my husband watches this and maybe get his take on it.

I had been thinking back to when I started this vlog, this channel. It was because I got a Starz subscription for a year and my husband said, “Everything on here is terrible.” I said, “Fuck you, I’m going to watch a movie on Starz every day and do a podcast on it.” He was like, “No you’re not, maybe once a week.” But I haven’t been keeping it up. So I wanted to check Starz today, and I wanted to check the most recent stuff that was put up on there. Dashcam was the first horror movie that I found trolling through the recent stuff put on Starz.

Make no mistake, Starz is a terrible service, but if you dig, you find some interesting stuff because it’s basically Lionsgate, which we all love for direct-to-video horror. I don’t like to recommend things, I don’t like to review things, and I don’t like to regard horror movies as a test of my endurance because I’m not watching them to see something disgusting. I’m watching them to look past what’s disgusting and find, if not the meaning that was intended, maybe the meaning that came out of the director’s vision. Sometimes, it’s the whole “death of the author” theory: once they put it out there, it’s for you or me to interpret. I can really respect what this guy—I think his name’s Rob Savage—did with his frustration about lockdown with this movie.

If that sounds like your type of thing, you can find it on Starz. I will link to some of the other things that I’ve done as the challenge to watch Starz in the description. I’m going to go now to a birthday party for a dear friend who I want to protect from illness, and I can’t believe that I’m getting together with a bunch of people at a birthday party again. I hope that you’re doing okay and that you’re getting together with people. Have a good evening. Bye-bye.