Review #159: Cam (2018)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #14 - Cam (2018)

I'll start this review off by saying that I think there's a lot of potential in a horror story about a cam girl, or any kind of person in the sex industry. And this movie plays with a lot of that potential- having a follower show up in your hometown to stalk you, having your family discover what you do for a living before you're ready to tell them, having your persona stolen and nobody seems to understand or care- heck, even just a movie where your cam girl account gets hacked and you have to deal with the least-helpful customer service representative in the world is a legitimately horrific premise for a story. But for all of the dangers lurking around the corner for someone in the sex industry, "having an AI (or possibly ghost?) do your job for you" seems kind of far down the list.

The premise of this movie is as follows: Madeline Brewer plays Alice, a cam girl who (under her online persona, Lola) breaks into the top echelon of cam girls, and upon doing so, finds herself locked out of her account. Except, her account is still active, and still putting on shows- as far as she can tell, someone who looks, sounds, and acts exactly like her, has taken over her account and is continuing to perform (and rise up the ranks!) while Alice struggles to wrest control of her persona.

That's a perfectly fine premise, and for the first half of the film I was genuinely intrigued as to where this could be going. But the problem is... I just don't get what the goal was, and why any of this was happening. I'll sort of spoil the ending- or, lack of one rather- you never find out who or what took over her account, nor do you find out how this other (person? entity? ghost?) was able to perfectly mimic this or any other persona. There was apparently originally intended to be a different ending where Alice discovers some kind of AI algorithm was responsible- taking hundreds of hours of footage and cobbling new content together from it- but honestly, that raises as many questions as it answers. Why? Why would anybody do this, and what's the endgame? Considering how Alice's whole deal is to earn money (this is her job) and so much time is spent showing how much money is brought in through these cam shows, you would think that if someone set up an AI to flawlessly mimic cam girls in such a way that they're guaranteed to become wildly popular and wealthy, then surely it would be about money, right? But the struggle of the movie certainly isn't about money, it's about identity. Alice maybe gets a little bit upset at losing her livelihood, but motivation-wise, she is far more driven by the anger of someone else stealing her identity and posing as her. (To the point where, spoilers, when she finally does get ahold of her account at the end, not a single frame of film is spent dealing with her finances, she just immediately shuts down the account instead.)

But even if the ending was originally meant to reveal an AI algorithm, that's not what we got in the film. The film teases us with mysterious deaths across the country, and with the cam shows giving out information that simply couldn't have been gleaned from existing footage (Lola and Baby give the audience a tour of Alice's house, for example, and name-drop her brother, none of which would have been on camera at any point) so it seems to strongly imply some kind of supernatural element. So if that's the case, I must again ask, what's the endgame? Why do ghosts want to be the top cam girl on the internet? Where's all the money going that is donated to these ghosts?

And there's a bunch of time spent on Alice establishing that she has these "rules"- she doesn't fake orgasms, she doesn't tell anybody she loves them, etc. There's even a moment where the secondary characters taunt her about how she's going to need to break her rules- the part where she's doing a big show riding a sex machine and it seems like it would be the perfect time story-wise for her to break her "no faking orgasms" rule, especially considering this is immediately before the AI Ghost takes over- but if she indeed fakes it, that's not at all communicated through the movie, and instead becomes something that the viewer is likely to assume after-the-fact because otherwise the setup seems like it went nowhere. (And if she never tells anybody she loves them, how did the AI have footage to use when making her say it later in the movie?)

This movie starts off with an interesting premise but just becomes more and more of a mess the more you think about it. I found the more down-to-earth scenes (like the birthday party scene or the scene where the cops clearly are not going to help) to be far, far more unsettling and compelling than the scenes where an inscrutable AI Ghost is running the show. I don't know if there were a ton of deleted scenes or if the writing was just a mess from conception to product, but the end result is definitely a mess.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Obviously Fake Suicides

Recommendation For Anyone Watching This Film: Don't watch it on your phone while at work! It looks super sketchy!