‘You stole my face and now I’m going to get it back…’
There has been a slew of cyber horror movies – films that take place entirely on computer screens and webcams – and they have actually been mostly successful. This subgenre has yet to have a breakout film to drag it into the limelight a la Blair Witch Project and found footage, but it is still more than holding its own in the horror landscape. Cam is neither purely cyber horror, nor is it to be that breakout film, but it is a fascinating psychological portrayal of ambition, sexual politics and the concept of a doppelganger. It should have had way more of an impact than it eventually did.
Alice (Madeline Brewer) is an ambitious camgirl who is obsessed with entering an arbitrary list of the top 50 performers on the cam site that she is affiliated with. In between trying to keep her various high paying customers happy – the nervous, sweaty Tinker (Patch Darragh) and the sleazy obsessive Barney (Michael Dempsey) – Alice starts to realise that a new girl on the scene is awfully familiar.
Firstly, as far as I’m aware this is the first horror film to explore this arena, and it is an area that deserves to be magnified under a gruesome lens. This is a murky world, understood by few, populated by presumably awful men and the opportunism for exploitation – on all sides – undoubtedly rife. Sex work in general remains fairly untouched in the world of horror movies, despite the real life horror that it provokes on a daily basis. Crucially, Cam recruited former camgirl Isa Mazzei to help tell this story, and it is her contributions that ensure an authenticity that push to make Cam such a success.
Madeline Brewer is perhaps best known for having her eye plucked out on A Handmaid’s Tale in which she plays the increasingly tragic Janine. Here, she plays two sides of the same coin as Alice and Lola, as well as a friend, older sister and troubled daughter. She captures the descent into paranoia and tragedy perfectly, whilst ensuring that Cam never ventures into I Know Who Killed Me territory.
Cam is no masterpiece, but it is a well acted, powerful take on an area that the horror genre has never really explored before. Deserving of a much bigger audience.