There are unlikeable protagonists, and then there is Annie in DASHCAM, a film that bravely asks: “What if we made a horror movie where the monster isn’t the demon, or the cult, or the parasite, but the main character’s personality?”
Rob Savage’s follow-up to Host looks, on paper, like a clever move: another screenlife horror movie, this time shot through the chaos of a livestream, anchored by a real musician playing a semi-fictional version of herself. In practice, it plays like getting trapped in an Uber with the world’s worst improv rapper while the apocalypse happens out the window and she keeps turning the camera back on herself.
Annie: The Final Girl You Secretly Hope Won’t Make It
Let’s start with the elephant in the car: Annie Hardy, playing “Annie Hardy.” In theory, she’s a chaotic, gonzo personality: a brash American musician, a conspiracy theorist, a COVID denialist who freestyles raps using her chat’s comments as lyrics.
In theory.
In execution, Annie is:
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Loud
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Obnoxious
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Relentlessly self-absorbed
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Politically insufferable
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And somehow still not interesting enough to justify spending 80+ minutes glued to her face
You can see what Savage wanted here: a provocatively unfiltered, “love her or hate her” anti-hero who drags the viewer through escalating horrors. But the balance is way off. You don’t spend the movie nervously laughing at her abrasiveness; you spend it wondering if the demon can get her to shut up for five consecutive seconds.
Her stream shtick—improvised rap with live chat lines—is cute for about 40 seconds. The film stretches it over the entire runtime like a comedy bit that refused to die, then throws demons and cults at it, hoping the collision will generate meaning. Spoiler: it mostly generates headaches.
COVID, Conspiracies, and the World’s Most Annoying Tourism
The film is set during the COVID-19 pandemic, which could’ve added some interesting texture. Instead, it quickly becomes a backdrop for Annie to:
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Refuse masks
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Rant about restrictions
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Harass restaurant owners
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Argue with her old bandmate’s girlfriend about politics and social issues
Her big move is leaving COVID-stricken Los Angeles to show up uninvited in London, barging into Stretch’s life (Amar Chadha-Patel), then immediately making everything worse. Stretch is a delivery driver trying to survive; Gemma, his girlfriend, is rightfully horrified when Annie walks in like a plague in human form with a ring light.
Their dynamic is actually one of the more grounded parts of the movie: Gemma hates her, Stretch is stuck in the middle, Annie refuses to take responsibility for anything. It’s a vaguely interesting domestic comedy wedged into a horror film… and then the horror shows up, sees Annie, and probably regrets it.
After Gemma and Annie clash (MAGA hat and all), Annie overhears Gemma urging Stretch to kick her out. Reasonable. Annie’s response? Steal Stretch’s car and his phone, then hijack his delivery job.
So yes, our protagonist is not only an obnoxious streamer, but also a thief who literally steals a man’s livelihood during a pandemic. Relatable!
Plot: Grandma Uber for Satan
The horror plot kicks in when Annie’s stolen gig sends her to a closed restaurant, where the desperate owner offers her money to transport an elderly woman, Angela, to a specific address.
Since Annie will agree to do literally anything on livestream if it gets her attention (or a tip), she says yes, throws Angela in the car, and heads off into the night.
Very quickly, things get weird:
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Angela soils herself
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They stop at a diner
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Annie discovers Ariana Grande tattooed on Angela’s stomach like the world’s worst fan tribute
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A frantic woman shows up looking for Angela and attacks Annie
From there, it’s pure chaos:
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Angela disappears and reappears in trees
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Stretch tracks Annie down (via her stream) and gets sucked into the nightmare
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Angela’s mother insists Angela is actually 16 and cursed, not a sweet old lady
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Cars crash
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Arms snap
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Angela rips off her mom’s head and goes full telekinetic demon girl
It’s like the script was written by feeding “evil grandma,” “possessed teenager,” and “cult nonsense” into a blender and hitting “purée.”
Found Footage or Found Migraine?
The film is presented entirely through Annie’s iPhone screen: livestream interface, chat comments, overlays, glitchy signal—the works. Screenlife, when done well, can be immersive and unnerving. Here, it’s mostly disorienting, and not in the good, “oh god I feel what she’s feeling” kind of way.
The camera:
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Whips around
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Drops
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Stutters
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Switches between front and back
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Overlays with chat, emojis, and streaming artifacts
Technically, it’s impressive. Visually, it often feels like watching someone livestream a panic attack from inside a washing machine. There are flashes of brilliance—one or two moments where the chaos enhances the tension—but too often it’s shaky-cam plus screaming plus compression artifacts equals “I can’t tell what’s happening, but I assume it’s bad.”
Demons, Cults, Parasites… and None of It Really Lands
Once Angela stops being a mysterious old woman and starts being your standard-issue demonic telekinetic nightmare, the film just starts throwing supernatural ideas at the wall:
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Angela floating creepily
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Demonic strength and speed
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Occult symbols in a remote house
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Cult members slitting their throats in front of Annie
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A giant slug-like humanoid parasite crawling out of Angela’s mouth
Each individual image could be cool. “Creepy cult suicide ritual” and “slimy monster from someone’s mouth” are not exactly losing concepts. But they pile up without much coherence.
Is Angela possessed? Cursed? A vessel? Why is there a parasite living in her mouth? Who is the cult serving? Why does it involve Ariana Grande stomach tattoos? The movie’s answer is basically: “Shut up, look at the chaos, isn’t it wild?”
There’s no sense of escalating dread—just escalating noise. Horror works best when the weirdness feels like it’s growing from some horrible internal logic. DASHCAM just feels like an improv show where the prompt is “something else crazy happens.”
Stretch: The Only One We Like, So Of Course He Dies
Poor Stretch. He’s:
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Reasonable
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Mostly kind
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Clearly too good for this situation
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And constantly being dragged into existential danger by a woman who stole his car and livelihood
Naturally, he dies. In an abandoned amusement park, no less, because subtlety died several scenes earlier. His death is one of the few moments where you actually feel something resembling emotion—mostly irritation that the only halfway decent human in the film gets stuffed, while Annie continues careening around like a chaos goblin with Wi-Fi.
By the time she’s beating a giant parasite to death with her own keyboard, you realize that, aside from Stretch, you haven’t been truly worried about anyone. You’ve just been waiting to see what new nonsense the movie can add to the pile.
The Ending: Trauma, But Make It Content
In the final stretch, Angela is dead (for real this time, question mark), the parasite has been bludgeoned with a musical instrument, bodies are everywhere, and what does Annie do?
She gets back in Stretch’s car
Fires up the stream
And starts freestyling a rap about the night
Of course she does. Because ultimately, DASHCAM isn’t about demons, or cults, or curses. It’s about the kind of person who could watch the world burn, narrowly escape death, see multiple people die horribly… and think, “This is going to KILL on my channel.”
It’s a perfect ending for this character and a deeply irritating one for the viewer. The film clearly thinks this is darkly satirical—look how online culture numbs us, how everything becomes content. And yes, that’s a valid point. But by this stage, the audience has spent so long trapped inside Annie’s skull that it feels less like biting commentary and more like Stockholm syndrome.
Final Verdict: Great Concept, Weaponized Annoyance
DASHCAM is a fascinating failure. It has:
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A bold format
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Some legitimately freaky images
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A willingness to be abrasive and confrontational
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A few strong set pieces
And yet, it trips over its own main character, an overcaffeinated nightmare whose presence smothers any tension the film manages to build.
If you have a high tolerance for:
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Shaky found footage
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Online chaos
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Protagonists you’d gladly sacrifice to the demon in the first 10 minutes
…you might find DASHCAM an interesting experiment.
Everyone else will likely walk away feeling like they just watched a demon, a cult, and a parasite all try—and fail—to upstage the true horror of the film: being stuck on a livestream you can’t click out of, with Annie driving both the car and your blood pressure off a cliff.
