Protagonist Alice, screen-name 'Lola,' finds her attempts to climb the ladder of popularity for cam-girls complicated by the appearance of another cam-girl who looks and sounds exactly like her -- and is willing to do stuff that Lola is not.
Cam takes us into cam-girl culture, an online niche I'm not that familiar with. Alice seems to make a good living from her feed, supplementing it with gifts from some of her more ardent admirers. The ardent admirers are... pretty creepy. Is one of them the source of doppel-Lola? Or is something even weirder going on?
Madeline Brewer makes for an engaging protagonist. The film doesn't condescend to her cam-girl shenanigans -- it's a job, even if it involves nudity and feigned sex acts. And as things escalate both online and in the 'real' world, Alice has to find reserves of character she may not be aware of possessing. All this without a Very Special Ending in which cam-culture is revealed to be The End of the World As We Know It.
Cam is visually interesting, moving between the mundane colours of the day-to-day world and the vibrant f*ck-me colours of Lola's cam-room, other cam-rooms, and the online presences on the cam-girl site. Directot Goldhaber handles both the gradually building weirdness and a couple of explosions of violence with care. There's even a stunner of an 'embarrassment' scene that doesn't pay off later in quite the way the viewer expects it will.
In all, this Netflix film is a solid piece of horror, its characterization of Alice sensitive, its willingness to avoid pat answers a godsend. It even plays fair within the rules of the cam-girl site when it comes to facing the mysterious entity. Highly recommended.
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