Dashcam ★★

IT DOESN’T take long for the makers of Dashcam to ditch the promoted cinematic device.

I was wondering how they were going to present an entire film, albeit less than 80 minutes long, solely from the perspective of dashcam within a vehicle.

Turns out they do it by having the dashcam also point into the vehicle and using the perspective of mobile phone cameras being held by two characters when they are out of the vehicle.

That’s a fair old cheat.

In the end the best and most suspenseful scenes are actually those that do play out in the car, mainly because at least the damned camera is mostly static.

I’m not one of these viewers who has a fundamental dislike of so-called ‘shaky-cam’. There are plenty of good, engaging found footage or hand-held examples.

But the shuddering mobile phone camera movement in Dashcam is very distracting and more than a little lazy.

Also distracting is an online comments crawl down one side of the screen which adds very little to the overall film.

The other major problem is the main character – an obnoxious, opinionated and selfish social media ‘performer’ who seems to spout views purely to elicit an emotional response and pseudo-controversy.

Writer and director Rob Savage’s previous effort was Host in 2020 which used a range of laptops during an online seance to present the story.

It’s a much better film than Dashcam.