Dashcam – Smart Idea
Director: Christian Nilsson
Writer: Christian Nilsson (Screenplay)
Starring: Eric Tabach, Larry Fessenden, Zachary Booth, Guillian Yao Gioiello, Noa Fisher, Scott Aiello
Plot: Dashcam is a psychological thriller following Jake—a timid video editor at a local news channel who fantasizes about becoming a reporter. While editing a piece on a routine traffic stop that resulted in the death of a police officer and a major political official, Jake is inadvertently sent dashcam video evidence that tells a completely different story.
Runtime: 1 Hour 21 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Dashcam starts as a video editor Jake (Tabach) is waiting for dashcam footage that he can edit into a news story in his continuing hope to make it as a reporter. Before Jake starts working on the edit, he gets a warning phone call from a stranger, not to get too involved with the footage, or he would be impeding an investigation.
As Jake starts to look closer at the footage, he starts to believe the police are trying to cover up something else, in what looks like it could have been a political assassination, with this having the potential to let him have a big story break.
Thoughts on Dashcam
Thoughts – Dashcam is a thriller that will see an ambitious young man who wants to become a journalist who is working on a video edit of a police shooting, only to find himself learning about a bigger cover-up. This is an interesting idea, one that could go in many different directions, ones that the film fails to capture, because most of the film seems to focus on the editing of the clip, trying to uncover little details in either the video or sound. We could have seen a truly intense thriller here, but in the end, most of the early interactions don’t seem to be part of the main part of the film. The film did spend a large part of the film within the apartment, mostly through the computer screen, which would have helped keep things contained. This is one of those films, that does feel like we had so much more potential about everything about it, it is a shame that not everything clicks the way it could have.
Final Thoughts –Dashcam is a film with so much potential, it just doesn’t hit the heights of what it could.
