On Halloween night in New York City, TV news editor Jake (Eric Tabach, What We Found) races to complete an exclusive package on the high-profile death of former state attorney general (indie-horror icon Larry Fessenden, We Are Still Here) by a police officer who pulled him over in a routine traffic stop.
Or was it? As Jake’s almost-edited piece shows, conspiracy theorists believe the AG’s death was an assassination at the order of their vengeful governor. All Jake has left to do is drop in the police car’s dashcam footage, due to arrive in his inbox any moment. Once it does, it’s immediately followed by a second email — this one accidental and containing highly classified info, such as the officer’s bodycam footage, which the public was told did not exist. When Jake notes a discrepancy between the reported number of gunshots and what the secret video reveals, his Spidey sense tingles big-time.
Thus, Dashcam — the lower-profile of two concurrent films bearing that title — follows Jake as he clicks, copies, drag-and-drops, imports, enhances and other-action-verbs files on his Mac to forensically figure out the truth. Not unlike Unfriended or Searching, screen time gets lots of screen time, with Adobe Creative Cloud inadvertently something of an indispensable supporting player here.
Known for the buzzy short Unsubscribe, another desktop-based drama, filmmaker Christian Nilsson branches out to full-length features with Dashcam, fairly successfully, as he’s able to keep viewers engaged — albeit at a consistently low wattage — even though they’re literally watching his protagonist work a keyboard and mouse. That said, with the prodding of his girlfriend (Giorgia Whigham, MTV’s Scream: The TV Series), Jake hits the streets to find the answers he so desperately seeks. Where that lands underwhelms — not because of what occurs, but because it’s what you expect to occur. For the innovation Nilsson applies elsewhere, its absence from the conclusion can’t help but register as a letdown, even for the mildly invested. —Rod Lott