Movie Review: Cam

Cam *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Daniel Goldhaber.

Written by: Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber & Isabelle Link-Levy.

Starring: Madeline Brewer (Alice / Lola), Patch Darragh (Tinker), Melora Walters (Lynne), Devin Druid (Jordan), Imani Hakim (Baby), Michael Dempsey (Barney), Flora Diaz (Fox), Samantha Robinson (PrincessX), Jessica Parker Kennedy (Katie), Quei Tann (LuckyDuck), Linda Griffin (Jen).

 

I am not the first person, and I won’t be the last, to remark that the new film Cam has a concept that the creators of Black Mirror right now are kicking themselves for not coming up with first. This feels, in many ways – especially in the first half – like a feature length Black Mirror episode. Not all of it works, and you could argue that perhaps a 60-minute episode would have been sufficient – perhaps even superior – to the 90-minute version we get here, but the film works because the concept is ingenious, and the lead performance is brilliant – enough so that the film overcomes its few rough patches.

 

In the film, Madeline Brewer (best known for playing the increasingly unhinged Janine on The Handmaid’s Tale) as Alice, a young woman with limited job prospect, who has started making her living as a “cam girl” – those women who do live chats with audience of paying men that are partly sexual, but partly something else as well. Alice, known as Lola on the site, has been making her way up the charts – she’s almost in the top 50 now – which means more viewers, and more money. She has standards she says – she doesn’t fake orgasms for instance, although the first show we see has a far greater fake out in it than that. The movie wisely does really show us anything sexual – I think there may be a nipple briefly seen early on – but this is a movie about a woman who works in a porn adjacent industry, but isn’t porn itself.

 

Alice wakes up one morning to discover something strange – Lola is doing a live show right that minute, which makes no sense, because she’s Lola, and she’s not doing one. But she can see it live on her computer screen, and it’s clearly her, and she’s clearly on her set. Then she finds she is locked out of her account, and customer service isn’t being very helpful. What may be worse – at least for Alice – is that this Alice is gaining more popularity than she ever did. She may even make it to the top 10. No one – aside from a few creepy clients – seems too much care either, and her secret online life starts to spill over into her real, offline one.

 

In short, the simple, brilliant premise of Cam is what would happen if your online persona became completely divorced from you as a person – and what happens when it turns out people like that persona more than they like the real you. I guarantee you right now, Charlie Brooker is coming up with a way right now to explore than in the next season of Black Mirror, without being sued. So yes, while in this case, the film is about a cam girl – someone technically working in the sex industry – at its core, it is a universal fear it is tapping into.

 

What ends up selling the movie the most is Madeline Brewer and her dual performance. The new onscreen version of Lola is one version – one that Brewer is able to mute the emotions on, making her into more of a dead eyed sex object than the real Lola ever was. You can tell the difference between this version of Lola, and the Lola we first see doing the show – who is funnier and more personable, and more recognizably human (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when the onscreen Lola acts like more a sex object, men like her more than when she’s playing a real person on the camera). Off-screen, Brewer is excellent as she becomes increasingly paranoid and freaked out but what is happening.

 

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, who co-wrote the movie with Isa Mazzei and Isabelle Link-Levy, Cam is a horror movie of sorts – although not one about blood and violence and death, but rather one about identity, and our tenuous grasp on it. Some of the plot mechanics don’t really work (having to describe how the double got there was always going to be unbelievable – and it is) or not really necessary (the stuff with her family feels under baked and on autopilot – as much as I liked seeing Melora Walters as her mother) – but overall, Cam is a frightening movie about this moment in time.