Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Body Cam’ on Amazon Prime, a Somewhat Ambitious Creepfest About Ghosts and Police Brutality

Now streaming on Amazon Prime, Body Cam is a horror film with a hot button. It’s set in the midst of national protests after a Black man is unjustly killed by police; coincidentally, the movie was originally released only days before real-life America erupted in protest after George Floyd’s murder. But the movie is also a supernatural creeper starring Mary J. Blige as a cop investigating a colleague’s strange and mysterious death. Now let’s see if all this subject matter functions harmoniously.

BODY CAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A cop (Ian Casselberry) in Swinton, Louisiana pulls over a van and, as he’s confronting its driver, is thrown into the air in a rather unnatural fashion. The beat cops on duty, Renee Lomito (Blige) and her rookie partner Danny Holledge (Nat Wolff), find his body gruesomely impaled, and Renee sees unusual snippets of things on his glitchy body- and dash-cam footage just before it all goes kaflooey. It’s a tough first day back on the job for Renee; she’s still grieving the death of her young son, who recently drowned, and the stress caused her to unlawfully smack a perp after he called her “a Black bitch.” On top of that, the world is tense at the sight of cops, even here in Swinton — the news is full of troubling footage of unrest after Los Angeles police were acquitted in the unjust death of a Black man.

Renee takes it upon herself to “play detective” and follow a very thin thread directly to the heart of the matter. Maybe she’s lucky or just has a sixth sense? Anyway, it involves a former health worker named Taneesha Branz (Anika Noni Rose), whose son recently died. Renee and Danny find her unoccupied house, which deserves a good… slow… walk… through it, without ever finding a lightswitch of course, so their flashlights can create creepy shadows. Someone or something is definitely lurking about, but they don’t find them/it, necessitating several more good… slow… walks… with flashlights through dark set pieces as the movie progresses. Slowly.

As she unravels the mystery, Renee proves to be a cop who isn’t afraid to color outside the lines, or act sans logic for the sake of the plot and its entertainment value. There’s an incident at a convenience store where the lights go out except for the ones in the coolers because the scene’s more moody that way, more bodies in various states of gruesome deformation, the perfunctory scene in the morgue with an odd-duck pathologist, and then, finally, a return to the serious, highly topical content the movie set aside for far too long. It will all come together, eventually, sort of.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Body Cam is Black and Blue mixed with one of those cursed-technology-themed horror movies like The Ring and some visual references to Unbreakable.

Performance Worth Watching: Given the right material, Blige has all the tools to be a powerhouse. She does what she can to color the sketchily written Renee with some nonverbal character development, but there isn’t much there for her to work with.

Memorable Dialogue: Renee starts to lose it, maybe: “I feel that there’s a different reality that only I can see.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Director Malik Vitthal and scripters Nicholas McCarthy and Richmond Riedel aim for the socially conscious horror bullseye, but only hit one of the target’s outer rings. Body Cam is a fairly rote scare- and gorefest covered with a ghost sheet that’s a newspaper with one of the modern era’s most prominent headlines on it. Police brutality is a significant problem in 2020 America, even more so in the months since Body Cam debuted, and it’s hard to watch any film — be it rooted in truth or far-flung fantasy or, in this case, something in between — about cops without the looming specters of real-life violence, racism and corruption hovering over it. In that sense, this movie, and far better efforts like Queen and Slim and Blindspotting, truly felt the pulse quickening.

The ghost in Body Cam functions as a metaphor for the invisible fear Black Americans often feel when they’re pulled over or confronted by police. But its focus and intent aren’t revealed until late in the film, long after it could invoke or mirror any real-world tension. It’s a crucial structural error in the screenplay — the movie all but drops its commentary for most of the first and second acts, and revisits it for a third-act twist. Of course, that’s a weary horror-movie trope, and it tells us that the film intends to scare us with blood and shrieks more than it wants to prod our gray matter. Only when the truth of the situation is revealed does the movie become compelling, about 15 minutes before it ends.

And this is where any serious discussion of the movie’s thematic ambition devolves into the usual ridicule of horror cliches: I do hereby declare that walking… slowly… through… a house… with flashlights is no longer a viable means of fostering suspense. It’s an excuse to deploy the same old boring jump scares. Same goes for the crackity-bones sound that supernatural whatnots in movies always make. CRACKITY BONES! Poorly staged scenes and disjointed editing makes key sequences confusing; the characters’ psychological travails never really take hold; the final scenes seem hastily sketched, and leave important questions unaddressed. Points for ambition, but the execution is problematic.

Our Call: A marginal STREAM IT. Body Cam just barely elevates above being a rote horror movie when it starts jabbing the hot button late in the third act. It swings and misses and hits a lot of foul balls before getting a solid base hit.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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