[Panic Fest 2022 Review] In "Dashcam" a Social Media Monster Meets a Real Monster

A social media monster meets a real monster in Rob Savage’s follow-up to Host.

I suppose if you are one of the Extremely Online types of people, you might have come across Annie Hardy during a marathon of Twitter doomscrolling. The lead vocalist for the rock band Giant Drag, she also livestreams raps, taking words from commenters and turning them into what amounts to diss tracks about AIDS and butt sex and more, all while driving in her car. During the pandemic, she also became vocal about how vaccines are terrible, masks are stupid and libtards are trying to cull the population, or something. I don’t know. I recently watched A Thief in the Night and some of her ravings could be soundbites from that early 70s Christian propaganda film, but I don’t have the gumption to really dig into all the terrible things she’s said online because that way leads to madness and frustration. If you want a primer, you can see this now-deleted post, and a couple YouTube videos of her Bandcar performances.

This last part is important because director Rob Savage’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Host takes Annie’s Bandcar schtick and runs with it down the spiral to Hell. Annie Hardy plays herself (or, in a lot of reviews, a “heightened/dialed-up version of herself”) and is introduced yelling at a man riding naked on his bike. “Where’s your mask?!” she ironically yells, to the love and admiration of her chat room. She’s streaming an episode of Bandcar, driving around Los Angeles and rapping about how the pandemic is forcing people to commit incest while her chat room eggs her own with things like “no libtards like last week” and “Beat us off!” while inquiring whether she is vaxxed or not. This opening segment ends on one of the only truly human moments: “I gotta get out of here” she says, a moment away from a true breakdown.

So she packs up her bags, says goodbye to her cat (the only other moment of pathos, as she tells her kitty “It’s okay. I’m feral, too. I understand.”), grabs her MAGA hat and boards a plane to London. Once there, she goes to the apartment of Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), a former member of the band, takes his emergency key, enters the house (“That’s called breaking and entering” someone in chat helpfully says) and wakes the sleeping Stretch with a loogie-slap to his face. His wife Gemma (Jemma Moore) is less than enthused and begins throwing things at Annie. This bad introduction is probably the best interaction she has with Gemma, who Annie calls a feminazi and constantly demeans. 

Eventually, Annie gets thrown out of the apartment (after having an almost violent altercation with a shop owner who simply wants her to wear a mask), steals Stretch’s car keys and livestreams her journey across London. But when she comes across a woman named Seylan (Seylan Baxter) who wants to pay her a huge wad of cash in exchange for taking an elderly woman named Angela (Angela Enahoro) to a specific location, this social media monster meets something more frightening than face masks. 

Anti-heroes have become a huge part of the post 2000s lexicon. From The Americans to Breaking Bad to Joker and even Maleficent, we cheer for the misunderstood villains and protagonists who do bad things…but for sometimes good reasons. The difference is that in most of these situations, there’s something kind and human hidden beneath the rocky exterior. A good anti-hero story can show that the good in horrible people complicates our view of the world. Antiheroes become complicated in horror films, where the horror is often predicated on the audience actually feeling pathos and empathy for the protagonists. It makes the horrible events-to-come more horrifying when you see a part of yourself in the people you’re watching.

It’s hard to do that here because Annie Hardy (in this and probably in life) is a shitposter. Someone who is contrarian and rude, truth or kindness be damned, just for the lulz. She does it to get a rise out of her forced audience. Her character here–and I have no idea if this is a “character” or real life, though her online presence indicates the latter–is the worst impulses of social media brought to life, egged on by anonymous chat rooms who just want to see something bad happen. 

When Dashcam pulls back the mask Annie uses to hide from the world, it gives us a few clues about the scared woman hiding under the confronting persona. “Most of you guys are at least nice to me,” she tells her chat at one point. “I don’t need anyone else.” It’s moments like this that hint at a deeper pain, but the script by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd is much less interested in exploring that deep-seated anguish and the human pain of forced isolation than it is hurling their budget at the audience in the form of chaotic explosions of horror. 

While Dashcam is longer than Host, it’s still structured similarly, with a lot of character beats ultimately upended by a rollercoaster ride of loud noises, startling imagery and haunting moments. The last half of the film has some very evocative imagery and truly unsettling moments of horror, like someone crawling through the backseat pass-throughs, cultish behavior punctuated by horrific violence and brief glimpses of what can only be described as eldritch monsters. Pulling from films like [REC]–a favorite of Savage’s–and Blair Witch, the creepy creatures are designed to make you scream “WTF?!”. But it also doesn’t really give you much time to rest between revelations and jump scares. 

Like Annie Hardy, Dashcam is the id personified and allowed to run amuck and the results are somewhat of a chaotic monotone. The last 40 minutes build from one cacophonous moment of sounds, imagery and shaky cams to the next. If it were more refined, it could reach the Looney Tunes nature of Evil Dead II because some of the violent moments are mere edits away from being dark, splatstick comedy. There’s enough fantastic horror moments here to fuel a few films, but they come one-after-another without rest to the point that the unrelenting nature fades into a one note monotone by the end. 

The result is a kind of troll movie, one that feels emblematic of Annie Hardy’s persona on the internet. It’s obvious that the filmmaking talents that birthed one of the more intense films I’ve seen in a long time are trying to operate on another level. But without refinement, it comes across as a horror kid’s notebook of frightening imagery rather than a cohesive piece of art that will have the longevity of their debut film. As much as I loathe Annie Hardy’s character and believe the filmmakers were irresponsible in giving her ravings a wider audience, I did have fun with Dashcam.

I have a feeling that if this film were released a few years from now when we’re (hopefully) out of the pandemic, Savage’s film might work better. The film does have some fantastic moments and I didn’t dislike it, but it’s a bit too slapdash. Whether it’s a schtick or not, Annie Hardy is obnoxious in the way that existing on Twitter sometimes is and her unpleasantness continues throughout the credits, which I gave up watching.

Hopefully Savage and Co.’s next film will add some much-needed refinement to their marvelously unhinged horror.