Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brandon Christensen
Starring: Jaime Callica, Sean Rogerson, Catherine Lough Haggquist, Angel Prater, Keegan Connor Tracy
Since his 2017 feature debut Still/Born, Brandon Christensen has established himself as one of the most reliable filmmakers on the current North American indie horror scene. Movies like Z, Superhost and Night of the Reaper may not pull up too many trees in terms of originality, but Christensen understands what makes the horror genre work and his films always deliver thrills if not innovation.
Bodycam sees Christensen (working once again with his co-writer brother Ryan) turn to the found footage format. As you might expect at this point, there isn't much here in narrative terms that you haven't seen before, but taking this sub-genre out of the woods and into a setting of urban deprivation gives it a novel twist.
As the title suggests, the film is presented mostly through the bodycam footage collected by two beat cops, officers Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Bryce (Sean Rogerson). Responding to a domestic disturbance call, the officers head to the "bad neighbourhood" where Jackson grew up, and where his mother (Catherine Lough Haggquist) still resides. The address they arrive at seems to have been unoccupied for years, with an absence of furniture and a colony of rats scurrying around its floors. Splitting up, Jackson comes across a bloodsoaked woman in the basement while upstairs Bryce encounters a man clutching something covered in a brown cloth. When the man lunges forward, Bryce shoots him dead, assuming he was concealing a gun. But he was carrying something else altogether, which deeply unsettles the two cops.
With a brief runtime of 75 minutes, Bodycam plays a lot like an episode of that great '70s TV show Police Story, which presented standalone stories set within a fictional California police district on a weekly basis. Of course, the found footage presentation makes Bodycam stand out, and Christensen quickly takes us into supernatural territory as Jackson and Bryce find that some force is unwilling to allow them to leave. Just as the protagonists of The Blair Witch Project couldn't find a way out of the woods, Jackson and Bryce find that they can't leave the hood. Some clever visual effects are employed to turn this neighbourhood into something that resembles a maze from a video game, with the cops repeatedly ending up back at the house of horrors no matter which way they turn.
For the most part, the Christensens avoid the sort of political commentary in their Canadian feature that you would expect if this had been made south of the 49th parallel, where policing has become such a hot button issue in recent years. But it is clear that the police have a bad rep in this part of town, populated mostly by homeless people straight out of Prince of Darkness. When Jackson turns to his mother for help, she makes it clear that she is unhappy with her son's career choice, but attempts to aid him nonetheless.
Christensen finds some clever ways to get the most from the limits of the found footage format. Having two characters wearing cameras allows for traditional cutting between viewpoints, and the director smartly uses reflective surfaces to create two-shots. In bad found footage movies you can tell there's a camera operator behind the camera rather than a character but Christensen wisely seems to have actually strapped his cameras to his two leads, and we always feel like we're seeing their perspectives.
I'm not sure there is enough plot here to justify a feature film, even one this brief, and I couldn't help but think Bodycam might have worked better as a segment of the ongoing V/H/S anthology series. But Christensen's pacey storytelling moves along nicely and keeps us from ever tuning out. Unlike its two guilt-stricken leads, you're unlikely to contemplate turning off Bodycam.
Bodycam is on Shudder from March 13th.
