Director Brandon Christensen’s latest found-footage horror outing, Bodycam, arrives with a genuinely clever hook: what if the “camera guy never puts the camera down” problem that plagues every found-footage film was solved by law enforcement policy itself? Police officers are required to keep their body cameras rolling for their entire shift, no exceptions. It’s a smart workaround, and for the first act, it pays off.
The Setup
Officers Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Bryce (Sean Rogerson) are dispatched to investigate a routine domestic disturbance call. Within minutes, the situation spirals into tragedy: a mistaken shooting leaves a man and his infant child dead. Panicked and unwilling to face public backlash, the two officers decide to cover up what happened. What they don’t realize is that their bodycams have captured something else entirely — something that was watching them long before the shooting ever happened.
What Works
The opening stretch of Bodycam is its strongest asset. The bodycam conceit genuinely earns its keep here, generating a claustrophobic, boots-on-the-ground tension that plenty of found-footage films struggle to manufacture. There’s a queasy, procedural realism to the early scenes — the derelict, mold-eaten house the officers stumble into feels like a character in its own right, and the film wisely lets its atmosphere do a lot of the heavy lifting before the supernatural stuff kicks in.
The performances from Callica and Rogerson hold up their end too. They play Jackson and Bryce as convincingly flawed, self-assured cops whose instinct to cover up their mistake feels uncomfortably plausible rather than cartoonish.
Where It Falls Apart
The trouble starts once the film tips fully into its supernatural territory. What begins as an unsettling, grounded thriller about guilt and cover-ups gradually morphs into a more conventional haunted-house/possession story, complete with a vague “unknown entity” antagonist that the script never bothers to define. The mystery is moody, but moody isn’t the same as meaningful, and by the back half the film is coasting on style rather than substance.
Bodycam also never digs into its most interesting question: who are Jackson and Bryce when the cameras aren’t rolling? We get a passing subplot involving Bryce’s pregnant wife, presumably meant to humanize him, but it’s thin and disconnected from everything else happening in the house. Similarly, the film gestures at the community surrounding the crumbling home it’s set in but never actually explores it, leaving a story that feels frustratingly hollow at its core despite a tight 75-minute runtime.
The bigger structural problem is one of sympathy: because the film establishes early on that Jackson and Bryce are willing to cover up an accidental killing rather than own up to it, it becomes hard to actually root for their survival once the haunting kicks into gear. Horror movies live or die on whether you care what happens to the people on screen, and Bodycam undercuts its own scares by making its protagonists tough to invest in.
The Verdict
Bodycam is a mixed bag — a film with a genuinely inventive premise that it can’t quite sustain for its full runtime. The first act is tense, grimy, and effectively unsettling, built on a clever justification for its found-footage gimmick. But once the film reveals its supernatural hand, it settles into over-familiar horror beats and rushes toward an ending that feels more like a shrug than a gut-punch.
If you’re a committed found-footage fan, there’s enough craft and atmosphere here to make it worth a watch, especially given how short and undemanding it is. But if you’re hoping for a slow-burn examination of police accountability wrapped in a horror premise, you’ll likely walk away wishing the film had trusted its grounded, human horror more than its supernatural twist.
RATING: 3/5
You can watch on:
- Amazon
- Shudder