Cam (2018)

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber & Written by Isa Mazzei

Viewed on Netflix

 

Summary: Cam is an atmospheric character-driven treat with a magnetic lead performance and it genuinely unsettled me. Strongly recommend!

 

Oh boy, here we go. I gotta talk about a movie that goes into a topic that makes everyone super uncomfortable, sex. And not just sex, but the sex work industry. Why do I have to talk about this? Why can’t I talk about something that everyone is comfortable with, like movies with atmospheric horror or brutal murder? I didn’t just pick this movie because of its topic though, I picked it because it’s a new indie horror flick on Netflix with a unique premise and main character, and I figure I should try and cover as much interesting indie horror as possible, because hey, that’s where most of the fun stuff happens. So if you really don’t want to read about a movie that has a main character who works in the sex work industry, you don’t have to read any further, but if you’re okay with that, then please join me as I talk about the film Cam!

Cam is a film centered around a woman, Alice Ackerman, who performs as a camgirl under the pseudonym Lola. If you don’t know what a camgirl is, I will explain. A camgirl is a performer who broadcasts live video of themselves, usually in a kind of chat room setting, and they make money by receiving ‘tips’ from viewers who watch these broadcasts. Now these performances don’t have to be sexual in nature, but they often are and those are the kinds of performances that several characters do in this film. Alice is an up and coming performer on the camsite that she works at, seeking to crack the ‘top 50’ highest ranked performers on the site with her unique blend of sexuality and macabre imagery. Things go according to plan for some time, until one day she tries to log in to do a show and finds someone is already performing from her account. Someone who looks and sounds exactly like her. Unable to log in to her account and met with a brick wall by tech support, Alice tries to figure out what is going on before this mysterious interloper does even more damage to her life.

If you can’t tell already this movie is about a bunch of people in the sex work industry, and this movie is not ashamed of that at all, which is a good thing because women are underrepresented in horror films and women who work in the sex industry are even less represented, especially as fully formed characters and not just as props or victims. Being about people in that industry means that this movie tackles a topic that a lot of people, in my home country of the USA at least, are super uncomfortable with, and that is frank depictions of sex and sex work. There are several scenes in the movie where we see Alice’s performances, and they get pretty graphic. Some might call that gratuitous, but I think they’re important to the story. We learn a lot about how Alice, in her Lola persona, relates to her audiences, how she handles herself and her shows, and it gives a “show don’t tell” aspect to Alice’s sex work, which, if this were a big studio release, might be absent. And if any evidence of Alice working on a camsite was absent, it would undermine the entire premise of the movie and make it really hard to actually show this imposter doing things.

What sells this movie, more than anything else, is the powerhouse performance by Madeline Brewer as Alice. Brewer effortlessly and seamlessly shifts between her personae of Alice and Lola, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg as far as her acting is concerned. Frustration, joy, determination, desperation, fear, derangement, Brewer cycles through all these emotions and more and pulls you into whatever it is she’s experiencing. This is also because of the strength of the writing, based on some of the experiences that Isa Mazzei had during her time working in the industry, that Alice feels like such a real, genuine person and that elevates what could, in the wrong hands, be either a Cinemax-style sexploitation flick or a sanctimonious pity party about a woman who made the ‘wrong choices’ and is now being punished for it.

It isn’t just the performances that make Cam excel as a horror film, but the structure of what we see and the realism of how these events start playing out that cements how scary this situation would be. I mean, any situation where a doppelganger suddenly appears and pretends to be you would be scary, but it is particularly frightening here. Alice has a reasonable set of rules for how she interacts with her online viewer base, things like how she never says she loves them and how she doesn’t share personal details of her life with them. This doppelganger doesn’t seem to care about these rules. As soon as this happens, there is this constant fear of what information this doppelganger gives out and what she says to this viewer base, and while we don’t spend too much time with members of Alice’s fans, the time we do spend does not bode well for what would happen if her home address or real name were to get out.

Cam is filled with wonderful paranoia and tension, it’s the first movie in a long long time to make me genuinely uncomfortable and tense while watching it and that’s probably the biggest compliment I can give it. Obviously the paranoia comes mainly from the Alice’s doppelganger but there’s more to it than that, Alice is also worried about family problems and her financial situation as well. Alice wants to tell her mom about exactly what she does, but struggles to do that because of this stigma attached to Alice’s line of work. It makes all their scenes together distinctly uncomfortable. As the film goes on, there’s this crushing sense of isolation that hits Alice, and it is compounded by her knowledge that whoever has taken over her account and is continuing to perform shows doesn’t seem to make any indication that they’re aware of Alice or her attempts to retake her account. This culminates in a beautifully tragic scene that shows just how close Alice is to breaking and it’s heart wrenching to watch.

I won’t give away the ending but it was exactly the kind of endings that I like the most when it comes to movies like this. Few things in horror are worse than a movie overexplaining everything to try and make sure no one is confused by an ambiguous ending. Cam manages to avoid that pretty well while also having an emotionally satisfying conclusion. It gave me a lot of It Follows vibes, which is great because I love that movie. Things are a bit light on plot but the atmosphere and the strong performances more than make up for the lean plotlines that the movie has. I would definitely recommend Cam, but maybe not for people who are too prudish, maybe just prudish enough to be uncomfortable. Also you may notice that I listed the director and writer for this one, because the two have collaborated on things before and presented the movie together as a stand against the culture of directorial supremacy in film circles.