Bodycam (2025)

Bodycam: Shaky, But Good | 3/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 3/25/2026

I am, generally speaking, a fan of found footage horror. I love REC, Host was one of the strongest horror experiences of 2020, and you can pull Noroi from my cold dead hands. I’d been hearing rumblings about this for a little while in various Facebook groups, but it was really the poster that finally sold me on checking it out. I love the very digital dissolve stylings of the design; it really prepares you for the environment you’re about to jump into. Seeing a new found footage entry that gets even decent reviews in the modern era is always a little exciting, so I carved out some time to make sure I got to check this out.

From the word go I really appreciate the commitment to the lower quality cameras as a stylistic choice. Shudder has a consistent issue with streaming their films at a questionable bitrate that can tend to make things look a little crunchy, but that wasn’t going to be an issue here since the bodycam footage already mostly looks like that. Leaning into it maintained a really good atmosphere throughout while our two leads, Officer Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson) respond to a domestic disturbance call. Immediately we get a solid feel for who our two leads are. Bryce acts as our potentially questionable bravado-filled leader, with the duo’s first on-screen action focused on harassing a man who had been speeding. Joking about how he would pretend they weren’t there, they end up getting a call to investigate a domestic disturbance before they commit to pulling him over. On the way to the call, Bryce makes some derogatory comments about the neighborhood, which Jackson attempts to minimize. He talks about having been raised here, and that it’s only been in the last few years things fell apart. Bryce is clearly made uncomfortable by this, issuing a couple halfhearted apologies and further establishing the team’s chemistry.

The first thirty minutes of this movie are by far where it’s at its strongest. Bryce and Jackson enter the house after hearing screams, and it's hard not to feel like we’ve landed in the middle of a first-person horror game. Radio communications go dead while flashlights cut a path through the darkness, highlighting the barren house and its yellowed walls for all to see. Hearing noises from both upstairs and down, the two split up to most efficiently cover the ground. While Jackson finds a series of occult symbols on the wall painted, presumably, by a woman covered in blood, Bryce makes his way to the basement. After finding a strange hole that seems to descend forever, he gets startled by a man holding something covered by a blanket. The man refuses to stop approaching Bryce, causing him to open fire, killing both the man and the baby Bryce hadn’t seen concealed in the bundle. This kicks off a short chase that concludes in the death of the woman from upstairs as well, leaving three bodies at the scene.

I can’t help but be fully bought into this opening. Immediately Jackson tries to radio in what had happened, trying to remind Bryce that their bodycams had already seen everything. He tries to stress that nobody would hold anything against Bryce for what happened, but Bryce has other opinions. It’s made clear through his statements that he’s been a little loose with the rules in the past, talking about being thrown to the wolves as soon as the precinct needed a fall guy for something. This, coupled with his continued contempt for the presumed drug users they had just killed, cements everything we need to know about Bryce as a person. The tension between the two is palpable, with Bryce all but beating Jackson into agreeing to cover up his mistake. It’s hard not to feel a chill down your spine seeing corruption live and at work, even if it’s peppered with confusing platitudes from one of our only other speaking characters about how “hard it is to do your job with bodycams keeping an eye on you.” From the opening to the moment Bryce attempts to illegally get his camera wiped, I’m fully sold out for this film. Borderline zero complaints, this is something that really worked for me.

Unfortunately that’s where we get into the back half of the movie. This is where I feel we start to get a little bogged down in the attempted lore, including elements of Jackson’s past and family. I understand that the bare bones beginning can’t carry a full film, but at a runtime of 75 minutes it’s hard not to feel like this wouldn’t have been a better 60-minute experience. A short driving stint fully realized in Unreal Engine takes us quickly to the conclusion, which I can’t help but compare to the end of the 2015 Turkish film Baskin. Frankly it’s not even that the film falls apart in any way; I just can’t help but think this same ending has been done better by others. Moments like the driving sequence in Unreal Engine did trip me up, unfortunately. The graphical capabilities of the engine can’t be denied, but it also has a very specific sort of wet sheen to it. This kept it living just enough in the uncanny valley for me to prevent me from getting back into the headspace the opening 45 minutes to an hour had set me. That said, this is a really solid achievement for an indie filmmaker, especially one who released not one, but two films in 2025.

While I feel it's a good concept that doesn’t quite stick the landing, I don’t think this is one to skip. If you’re a fan of found footage horror, you’ve already seen films that are leaps and bounds worse than this with only a fraction of the vision. For a man who is primarily seen in the visual effects seat, Brandon Christensen managed to deliver a compelling and engaging story that stuck out most of the run and made me interested in checking out some of his other work.