She performs under a pseudonym, and has a clear set of boundariesβno public shows, no saying "I love you," no fake orgasms.
But soon, Alice breaks her own self-imposed rules by participating in a public show, and finds herself unable to log back into her account. Her account, her audience, her money have been usurped by a doppelganger, and the rest of the film centers around Alice's fight to regain control.
Technically, Cam is far from perfect. The first act oscillates between absolute horror and sleepy small-town drudgery, and I found the ending laptop-flippingly unsatisfying. But its strength lies in its specificity, and oddly enough for a maybe- or maybe-not supernatural thriller, its realism.
Cam might not be a great movie, but it feels like an important movie. Sex workers in movies are seldom nuanced. The films best scenes brim with complex, morally ambiguous tensions. Blood pours onto a fuzzy rug and she falls backwards, only to sit back up and peel away the gash with a grin. Anyone on social media can relate to the need to constantly top oneself to stand out in a bustling digital crowd. Shock and awe is a good but risky way to do that. Just ask Logan Paul. Or Jake Paul.
The ceaseless pressures of the attention economy are consistent webwide. The doppelganger who hijacks her feed, whose face occasionally warps and glitches out into pixels under pressure, is a nightmare version of the deepfake βtechnology that can near seamlessly graft one face onto another body, often for pornographic purposes. For Alice and for many victims of nonconsensual pornography , attempting to explain the crime being committed to the police is met with not only confusion, but misogyny.
