Dir: Daniel Goldhaber
Starring: Madeline Brewer
Cam is about an up-and-coming camgirl trying to break into the top 50 performers on the site. Her channel gets stolen by another performer that seems to look exactly like her and is using her identity. I went into this movie completely blind. I knew absolutely nothing about it, besides the small blurb on Netflix, and I honestly expected low quality and more of an excuse for soft-core porn than a real horror. But it’s labeled as a psychological horror and I’m a sucker for anything in that subgenre, so I gave it a shot. It both surpassed my expectations and let me down, a very strange combination and I’m still confused by it as I write this.
Spoilers after this point
Trigger warning: this movie contains 2 graphic scenes of suicide
The movie begins in the middle of one of Lola/Alice’s cam performances. She’s desperately trying to move up the ranking tier and is pushing her content in order to appeal to a wider audience. It’s a normal show until an audience member asks her to hurt herself. She blocks them but they come back immediately with a new account. They tell her to cut herself, that they want to cut her, and she looks scared. Her room explodes with people telling her not to do it and block the person but, the tips also start rolling in faster and faster and her viewers count climbs. She takes out a knife, puts it to her throat and says, “Is this what you want? Because I’ll do it!” Her chat buzzes again with people screaming at her to put the knife down but this time people also tell her to do it, slit her own throat. The tips continue to pour in, and her ranking moves up steadily. She looks in the camera as she pulls the knife across her throat and the tip bell goes off constantly as blood falls and her body slumps forward. After a few moments of silence, while her chat stares at a still body, she laughs and pulls away a prosthetic appliance from her neck.
I have a decently intimate (no pun intended) knowledge of the camming industry and as far as realism goes, this is complete fiction. All the cam sites that I am familiar with have a very strict policy against implied or directly shown self-harm and any performer doing something like this would be permanently banned immediately. Especially when we find out that it was all a hoax perpetrated by herself and a friend to raise her rank. Making light of self-harm and suicide or using it as a tool for clout is generally never an appropriate thing to do on any platform. However, I also know there are a lot of people that troll those sites that would love to see something like that or would encourage it as a joke. It wasn’t a deal breaker for me, as far as whether I liked the film or not, but it is worth mentioning since it’s so far outside the realm of reality.
It takes a little bit for anything to really start happening to further the actual point of the movie and it becomes briefly solely about her cam ranking. She finds out that fan of hers has moved to be closer to her and she recognizes him while at the store. She doesn’t do anything about it initially, but he eventually calls and she tells him that it’s not ok and he’s never to call her again. While streaming a date night she hits rank 50 and begins celebrating. While cheering her viewer count begins tanking and her rank drops back down. She finds out that another performer has been asking viewers to make Lola drop rank in order to raise her own status. The following morning, she does a show in a “camming house” with another performer and her rank raises to 47. I want to mention that the use of sex and nudity was extremely appropriate and not at all what I was expecting. It’s not at all over the top and it’s only used in ways to further the story and there’s even several mentions of non-nude shows. I expected pornography with minimal story, but I was pleasantly surprised by and really appreciated how well that part of the film is done.
After finally breaking into the top performers, she finds herself locked out of her account. While trying to reset her password her channel goes live. Rightfully confused, she checks the feed and sees herself on the screen. She assumes it is a replay of an old stream but after doing some tests and communicating with “Lola” she realizes it’s not a prerecorded stream, it’s live. She calls the customer service line for the camming site, as you would expect, but gets nowhere with it because the woman on the screen is clearly the woman on the ID Alice submitted to create the account.
One thing this movie did really well is dropping seeds of who could be behind the Fake Lola. At first it makes you think it’s a competitor from the cam house because it happened the day after logging in to do a joint show. Then it kind of shifts to an old friend from high school because she mentions altering her pictures to make herself look more attractive. It shifts again to a fan called Barney that is coming to the area and wants to take her to dinner. He’s a known fan among all the top performers and makes several statements that he controls who is in the top.
With no one able to help her get her account back, Alice powerlessly watches the Fake Lola continue to stream and begins to unravel. She tips Lola and makes her spank herself. Eventually pushing her further and telling her to do it harder until she pulls out a gun. She puts it in her mouth and there’s another scene of faked suicide. This one couldn’t possibly be faked by prosthetics, so it shifts blame once again to something supernatural. After watching this Alice finally breaks down and destroys her laptop.
Alice finds out that the top performer on the leaderboard is dead and has been dead for over a year. But her profile is still streaming live and doing shows with other performers. Alice digs through profiles of the performers she has done shows with and finds that they all have 1 fan in common. The fan that’s moved to be closer to Alice, Tinker. She tracks Tinker to his hotel room and tells him the whole story and he agrees to help. She falls asleep in his room and wakes up to him on a private call with Fake Lola. This is where the story begins to unravel, and the disappointment starts to set in. Up to this point I genuinely enjoyed the film. Tinker is religious and the camera keeps highlighting a cross on top of his tv so I assumed this would come in later in the story and when Alice barges in on him with Fake Lola he’s saying some sort of prayer while masturbating. There’s nothing wrong with those things I guess but why introduce something that odd and then not use it. Just a very strange thing to do in my opinion. Alice talks to Fake Lola and Lola has no idea who she is. Alice has the sudden thought that Lola doesn’t know what she looks like.
Tinker also tells her that he knows what’s happening and he came to save Alice. He says he can tell who “it” is going to take next, that it takes all the information you put online and uses it to impersonate you. Alice just gets made that he waited to tell her and leaves. Doesn’t ask for help, or ask how she can make it stop, or if she’s going to die like the other girls. Just leaves. At this point I’m assuming it’s a simulacrum, similar to the one used in Simulacra and Simulacra 2, and I’m really interested to see how they’ll handle it.
Alice rushes home and sets up her cam and equipment so she can show the Fake Lola what she really looks like by paying for a private show. The film sets up this big dramatic moment, we’re finally going to see Lola coming face to face with Alice. Maybe her programming with fall apart or she’ll begin to glitch, or Fake Lola will become self-aware. Nope. Fake Lola doesn’t react to seeing Alice’s face in the slightest. She recognizes her from the stream with Tinker but that’s it. They open the private show up to the rest of the chat room and they do recognize that there appears to be “2 Lolas”.
For some reason they decide to start playing a game. They start copying each other and the room decides who wins, the loser must do whatever the winner wants. It starts off simple with a flirty wave and the chat decides Fake Lola wins and she makes Alice strip down to her underwear. On Alice’s turn to decide what to do, for some reason she slams her face into the desk and breaks her nose. I have no idea why this happened, other than maybe they were trying to show how much she’s losing it and that Fake Lola is obviously not a real human person. Which we know already. Of course, blood gushes down her face and she’s obviously in pain but Fake Lola just smiles. Fake Lola follows suit and slams her face down on the desk, but she shows no sign on pain and initially there’s no blood. After the chat reacts, Fake Lola’s face begins to glitch and a stream of blood falls down her nose. I tried to look in the glitch, but I couldn’t see any other face or anything. I would be really interested if anyone else saw an image in the glitch, so if you did please let me know. Alice slams her face down again, this time causing a huge gash across her nose. Fake Lola follows suit with no noticeable damage and begins glitching again. Long story drag on a little bit longer, the chat decides that Alice wins. As her prize she tells Fake Lola to give her the account password. There’s a bit of back and forth but ultimately Alice gets a private message with the information. While still on video chat Alice is able to get back in her original account. She presses the delete button, the screen goes black, and with that, the fight is over. The movie ends with Alice making a new account and going live, this time in a wig.
When I tell you a movie has never left me so let down, I am not exaggerating in the slightest. I prefer a bad ending or bad explanation to no explanation at all. There is so much that was never addressed. First and foremost, what even was the thing that took her identity? How did it target people? How did Tinker know to track it? Why was Tinker religious for no apparent reason? Was it supernatural? A virus? Did it cause the death of the top performer? Were the other girls it performed with dead as well? That’s what I took from it but we’ll never know. I could accept this ending if the movie itself had been bad, but it wasn’t. Up till about three quarters of the way through I was genuinely interested and impressed with it. The acting is solid. Madeline Brewer is extremely talented, especially when you take into account she was a relatively new actress at the time. Even the parts I didn’t like, she emotes well, and her character felt genuine. It’s shot very well, the nudity and sex aren’t overbearing, the soundtrack fits well, the cinematography is on point. The psychological aspect is even done well, and I feel like a majority of that came down to Brewer. There are times where I did think that maybe she had some sort of disassociation, and she was actually both people.
So, is this movie worth watching? Man I don’t know. I think it is worth it for the acting and overall vibe of the movie but be prepared for an ending that doesn’t answer anything it spends the entire movie building up. I think this movie would be fine as one to put on when you’re doing something else. Like, I tend to watch movies a lot when I’m gaming so I don’t have to fully pay attention but it’s still background noise and I catch the general story. If you’re on the fence about it, give that a try. If I missed something, or some vital point in the story, please comment down below and let me know. I would love to hear if someone has a different opinion on it.
Hope you enjoyed my rambling, talk to you next time.
Suspensefully yours,
Morticia Crypt
Crypt Of Fear 