96 min | R | May 19, 2020 | Paramount Players
A traffic stop ends in death and the dashboard footage shows something that cannot exist. Renee works the night shift in a department that would rather she stop asking questions. The dead do not file complaints, but they do leave evidence.
Renee Lomito-Smith is a beat cop working nights in a small department haunted by a fatal traffic stop. A fellow officer dies on a rural road and the body cam footage of his death defies physical explanation. Renee starts pulling the thread and finds a pattern of police killings the department has buried. Body Cam wants to be two things at once. It is a supernatural revenge story about the dead reaching back through the camera lens, and it is an indictment of police violence against Black Americans. The film never finds the seam where those two things join.
Mary J. Blige plays Renee with a coiled grief that anchors every scene she is in. She carries her own loss into the investigation and Blige lets that history sit behind her eyes without ever explaining it out loud. Nat Wolff plays her rookie partner Danny Holledge as a young man who wants the badge to mean what he was told it means. David Zayas plays Sergeant Kesper with the weary calm of a man who has decided what he is willing to know. Anika Noni Rose appears as Taneesha Branz and grounds the horror in a mother’s specific terror. The performances are sharper than the script that surrounds them.
Malik Vitthal directs from a screenplay by Nicholas McCarthy and Richmond Riedel. He shoots the patrol scenes in cold sodium light and lets the body cam itself become a character, the green night-vision frame stuttering and glitching whenever the dead intrude. That formal idea is the best thing in the film. The camera that is supposed to deliver accountability instead delivers a haunting, and Vitthal stages the kills as bursts of corrupted digital video. The problem is that the horror set pieces and the social argument keep interrupting each other instead of compounding.
The film has a real subject and a real image to hang it on. A surveillance tool meant to protect the public becomes the instrument of the dead’s revenge. Body Cam cannot decide whether it trusts that metaphor to carry the weight or whether it needs jump scares to keep the audience awake. It chooses both and commits to neither. What remains is a committed lead performance trapped inside a movie that flinches from its own best idea.