Dagr (2024) is quite clear on what it is and what it’s all about from the very opening credits: this is found footage, brought right up to date. We get some on-screen text telling us about two social media stars, Thea and Louise, who had amassed a serious following by 2021 for their particular shtick, setting the world to rights via controversial methods such as vandalism and theft. Calling their show They Deserve It (foreshadowing if ever there was foreshadowing) they had planned a spectacular heist – their term – in the summer of 2023. The fact that the on-screen text then acknowledges that this heist was their last film, and that their footage has been studied by South Wales Police as part of a homicide (homicide? Not murder?) case, rather spells out that bad things came about during this venture.
Of course, we wouldn’t be watching all of this footage, B-roll included (as the girls also refer to it) unless something dreadful had happened; few are the found footage films where everything was going well and cameras were simply, unfortunately lost along the way. It’s gratifying that, aside from filling in the audience on the police involvement here, the text also points out that a different film crew have taken responsibility for editing all of the footage together into a coherent whole – which is something you can’t help but wonder about in the vast majority of found footage cases. Who shapes the footage into a film? Here, we have an answer!
The thing with found footage is there are always a few questions left hanging around, even when (as in this case) we have a bit more know-how and consideration for plausibility; the addition of what sounds like dramatic music, for one, and – once we really pick up with the two girls – just how many cameras they have rolling at any one time, even in the car as they drive through rural Wales to their destination. They are on their way to a remote house, very much off the beaten track; beyond a couple of annoyed drivers, we never see any of the other local residents, but the sense of a time and place not really running to usual rules and values comes across nicely. Then, after spending some time with Thea (Ellie Duckles) and Louise (Riz Moritz), we’re introduced to a different filmmaking team: same destination, different perspective, different approach. This is a small group of professionals who have been tasked with making a sumptuous fashion advert; this team, headed up by Tori (Tori Butler-Hart), certainly aren’t lacking for ambition; it’s about this point in the film that its rather dark, or self-deprecating sense of humour starts to come through, as Tori begins seeking to channel Godard whilst filming two models preening with a hairbrush, and not without their artistic temperaments clashing a little bit. There’s clearly a lot of love, but also a lot of pleasure in playing with some of the more absurd sides of the filmmaking process here, something which Dagr returns to a few more times from this point.
Heading back to Thea and Louise, we find out how the two groups of people are about to meet: the girls are planning to masquerade as the advert’s catering team, giving them access to a load of expensive designer gear which they intend to steal, sell, and donate the money to food banks (whilst filming the lot for kudos, of course). So when they make it to the manor house, they’re delighted – at first – to find that there’s seemingly no one there at all. They start planning how to get the bags of expensive clothes and equipment into their car and away – but something stops them. There’s evidence of some upheaval in the house, for one; then the girls find some unattended iPads which they use to take a look at what the filmmakers had been filming, prior to apparently disappearing. They are alarmed, but assume what they’re looking at is part of some elaborate horror-tinged, avant-garde project, but then the blood and broken glass in the house makes them wonder if there may be something more to it. And, if something dreadful has taken place here, perhaps it soon could again…
A small budget is no barrier to ambition here and Dagr draws on a few titles and genres as it weaves together its own spin on its subject matter. There The Blair Witch Project, of course, and what at one point seemed like the countless titles influenced by it; there’s also the folk horror canon, though the use of folk horror here is fairly brief and minimal until we get towards the closing scenes of the film. Up until that point, what we get is fairly subtle – but it’s recognisable, out there in sunny Wales with its menhirs and old beliefs, and unseen locals handing out crow feather masks (never a good sign, frankly). There’s the recognisable and almost comfortable sensation that, the further away from urban life the two girls get, the more at risk they are from forces and folklore they don’t understand, giving a nod to that other folk horror trope: accidentally stumbling onto, or triggering, old magic. What makes Dagr rather different, however, is that it sends itself up a little more than you might expect; as much as films like The Wicker Man contain plenty of humour, other folk horror has tended to be rather po-faced – but surely, some humour is apt, given the blend of comedy and tragedy in a lot of folklore, itself often the source for folk horror. So we get some observational humour, a little knowing horror content, and some of each of these at the expense of filmmaking in general.
There are some minor issues here, firstly in terms of time management in the film: things are a little obtuse until the main set-up is revealed, with the two girls ad-libbing perhaps an implausible amount to each other/to camera about how surprising the countryside is to them; perhaps this is normal for this sort of thing, as the practice of self-filming and the sense that there’s always an audience has grown to be very normal for tens of thousands of people over the past decade or so, though this doesn’t mean that the generated content is always particularly sharp. That said, Dagr feels much more like an old-school found footage film, despite the context of there ostensibly being followers, likes and so on – because none of the coverage is actually going out live, thanks to that horror trope of No Mobile Coverage once everyone’s out at the house. As a result there’s less concern for the audience, there’s no framework of rolling comments or anything like that – just two girls (and another team in the same location) trying to piece together what’s going on. As for the horror content itself, it builds quite slowly at first, and this is the strongest aspect of Dagr: these little hints that all is not as it seems have a nicely subtle spin. The film’s denouement lands differently, whilst also feeling more familiar overall; I do wonder if a filmmaking team in charge of editing the whole thing together might not have translated the ‘voice’ which booms through some of the scenes, as this could have brought some of the plot points together; ‘Dagr’ translates fairly simply to ‘dagger’ from Welsh to English, though as for the rest, I’m not so sure.
Nonetheless, as a splice of horror genres, it does work overall, and Dagr is great at layering different perspectives and footage together to get some way towards its answers; this is the film’s strongest structural feature, showing that Fizz and Ginger Films are at their best when needing to play smart to get the most out of their cast, location and plot. Whether being self-deprecating or scary, it’s a modest but engaging feature film with enjoyable ideas.
Dagr (2024) has a limited UK cinema run starting from 7th February. It will open in the US in April 2024.