How one feels about shaky bodycam found footage types of movies is immediately going to reflect their opinion on Brandon Christensen’s newest that he co-wrote with Ryan Christensen in the tense, creepy, and at times disturbing Bodycam. There is a lot of shaky, found footage elements to the movie, and it adds to the horrors that are uncovered throughout the feature, and it makes for an interesting and short feature, but somehow somewhere along the way it gets lost and never really finds its footing again but leaves the viewer more intrigued and wanting to see more, than uninterested and checked out.
Bodycam focuses on, you guessed it, two police officers dawned in bodycams in the form of officer Bryce and officer Jackson (Sean Rogerson and Jamie M. Callica) as they’re investigating a domestic dispute, something that should be effectively routine for the officers if they’ve been on the job long enough. However, this is in a particularly bad part of town, surrounded by what the film refers to as ‘tweakers’ (meth addicts) and things aren’t exactly as they seem. One thing leads to another, and there is an accidental shooting and instead of doing the right thing, and facing the music for whatever happens due to this shooting they try to cover it up – but not only is it all recorded on their body cams, it’s also not just the bodycams themselves seeing what is happening.
What follows these events, is something that feels self contained and never allowing the audience or the performances to breath. As everything is from the perspective of the two body cams and never diverts from that, we feel trapped, It’s 75 minutes from start to finish of solely what is being captured on their bodycams. It’s an intriguing premise that Christensen fleshes out and executes well, but the audience becomes pigeonholed and confined to this one style and never gets to escape the area or damming situation they find themselves in. If the audience was able to break free of it, to even other camera angles from different perspectives maybe it would’ve created a creepier and more fleshed out final movie, but the constant tie to our two characters is ultimately the detriment to Bodycam.
While both Callica and Rogerson are great in their roles, it is not enough to keep the audience fully engaged with what is unfolding around them. The single style, which understandable, becomes the downfall of a movie that is otherwise incredibly creepy and unsettling exemplified by their performances. Their ability to keep the audience engaged by what their witnessing unfold in front of them even from a slightly different vantage point remains engaging, but overall lacks something more convicting to proceed to truly create a horrorfest for the audience to truly sink into.
