Cam: Worth a watch?

Netflix's offering of original horror movies has been patchy at best, but their latest release Cam immediately piqued our interest.

The movie explores the modern phenomenom of cam girls: women who stream erotic performances, allowing their viewers a say in the what happens on screen in return for cash.

Alice (Madeline Brewer) is scaling the Top 50 of her website, until a mysterious lookalike steals her account and starts to break down the delicate online boundaries Alice uses to protect herself.

It's available to stream now, but is it worth a watch?

Cam's hits

• It's written by former cam girl Issa Mazzei; hence why the details feel so authentic. The rivalries between the women; the sinister boundary-pushing of their male clients; the pressure for the women to constantly outdo their previous performance – all of it feels real. Mazzei faced some ugly misogyny when pitching the movie to studios, but thankfully Blumhouse realised the film's potential and gave Mazzei significant creative control.
• It's a feminist flick in an often sexist genre. One of Alice's main internal conflicts is whether to hold fast to her unique artistic voice or rely on nudity and hackneyed porno monologues, which have propelled many of her rivals to greater success. 
• Most of the film's runtime is just Alice alone with her webcam; Brewer brings a compelling mix of everywoman charm and fierce ambition to keep us rooting for her heroine.
• First-time director Daniel Goldhaber is also a dab hand behind the camera. The gliding long-takes at a disastrous birthday party where Alice's parents find out the truth about her career are a particular highlight.

Cam's misses

• Viewers looking for a traditional horror movie are likely to be disappointed. The identity-theft plot is just used to drive the action forward; the film is really interested in the fragility of Alice's control over her online presence. Its anxieties are very similar to Black Mirror's 'Shut Up and Dance'.
• Brewer is fantastic, but many of the supporting characters feel underdeveloped. We would have like to have heard more from Alice's mother (Melora Walters) and brother (Devin Druid).
• We love the fact that we learn surprisingly little about Alice's sinister lookalike, but we're guessing this ambiguity will leave some viewers frustrated.
• The film's neon-tinged, synth-soundtracked aesthetic is suited to its subject matter, but too many horror films are now falling back on this 80s nostalgia feel. It worked for It Follows and Replace, but feels a little worn out in films like The Neon Demon and Dead Shack.

Spoilers, questions and theories

• So what exactly was the entity that had been cloning cam girls? A computer program? A demon? We established that the cloned Alice was not self-aware, so was someone else calling the shots?
• Was Tinker (Patch Darragh) more involved than he admitted? When threatened by Alice he revealed that he knew which girls would be cloned, but does this explain why in each case he was the woman's number one fan? Or is the take home message that Tinker – and by implication many lonely men like him – prefer souless images of women that are devoid of agency, rather than living, breathing cam girls like Alice?
• Potential plot hole: How did Alice's clone manage to replicate her entire house and her family photos when they never appeared on her show?
• Anyone else notice that the clones of Alice and Baby used some of the same phrases in their shows?
• Nerdy theory alert: could the way that the clones' shallow replicas of cam girl clichés prove more popular than the real, creative women also be a metaphor for trends within the horror genre *drops mic*.

If you liked this review, here are more entries in our 'Worth a Watch?' series in order of quality:

• Possum
• Terrified

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