Cam is a snake eating itself. It’s also one of the bravest American horror movies of the last decade and nobody’s allowed to watch it anymore because Netflix decided it didn’t need to be in the library. We shall make of this what we will.
I came back to Cam for the show and left it convinced it’s the cleanest thing I’ve watched in years about what creative labor actually is when the platform you’re laboring inside has read your work well enough to do the work without you. Which is, I keep wanting to scream, a disaster. That’s the point of the movie.
Isa Mazzei wrote this. She used to do the work. You can feel it in every frame because she’s not making a movie about sex work the way movies that aren’t about sex work are about sex work. There’s no titillation, there’s no innocent-girl-falls-into-a-sordid-world nonsense, there’s just a competent professional with rules and a brand and a ranking she’s chasing, who wakes up one morning to find her account is being run by someone who looks exactly like her, who is breaking every one of her rules, and who is climbing higher than she ever did. The platform doesn’t notice. Customer service is friendly and useless. The doppelganger is just better at being Lola than Alice ever was, and it’s straight-up horrifying.
What is the doppelganger? Nobody knows. Mazzei has been asked and she won’t say. AI, supernatural, the platform itself given a body and a face, take your pick. I don’t think it matters. The horror is structural. It’s the contract Alice signed when she logged on. Alice and FreeGirls.live had an agreement and the agreement was you do the work, you get the ranking. The platform held up its end. The platform learned what Lola was well enough to keep ranking Lola without needing Alice in the room. Can’t fix it if it ain’t broke. So, I guess that’s not a malfunction. That is the system working.
Tommy on the show read the ending as Alice getting some control back. She makes new accounts, finds a way to keep working, doesn’t run off to live in the mountains. Tommy is half right. She does get something back. What she gets back is permission to keep being grist for the same destructive mill. The platform wins either way. The terms of use are the agent of horror. They are the modern AI book of the vampire and Alice signed them. The mountains don’t have an audience. There’s nowhere to go.
Chelsea read it as addiction and Chelsea is also right. Social media is an addiction and this is a movie about somebody who has figured out she’s going to spend the rest of her career managing hers because there is no exit. Alice is going to be making new Lolas for the rest of her working life and the bill has come due in the form of her continued existence as a person who used to have a name on a stream and now has to keep making one up and being someone new every time the system outplays her.
Sex work is work. The film does not treat it as a fall, as a cautionary tale, as a ruined-girl tragedy. It treats it as a job that requires skill and intelligence and rules and that pays you when you’re good at it and stops paying you when something else is better at being you than you are. That framing is unusual in horror and unusual in cinema generally, and it’s part of what makes this thing so steady on its feet. The horror is what the job costs.
Madeline Brewer is outstanding in this. She plays Alice and she plays the doppelganger and the differences are small enough that the platform’s failure to notice them feels exactly as inevitable as it ought to. Patch Darragh as Tinker is doing some real work as the kind of fan you never want. The movie is full of clients who aren’t monsters individually. They are the demand that wrote the persona the doppelganger is now executing without her.
Some of the back-third logic doesn’t hold up if you push on it. The bank-account hack, the impersonation of dead users, the way the doppelganger’s mechanics finally sort themselves. These threads aren’t as tight as the central conceit. They don’t pull me out of the movie but they don’t strengthen it either. The film is built on a clean idea and the clean idea is what carries it home.
Cam is not streaming anywhere legitimately right now. Netflix dropped it. We are in bootleg territory. This movie about a platform deciding it no longer needs the human who made the work is currently being deleted from the platform that distributed it. I don’t know if that’s irony or just the system working again.
Watch it any way you can.