3 out of 5

Directed by: Daniel Goldhaber

I’m trying to think what I would have done to make Cam, a horror thriller directed by Daniel Goldhaber and written by Isa Mazzei, stand out more.  When I say that the writer’s and director’s decision to treat the cam-girl industry – onliners with pay-for-play type web shows, focusing on the sexual aspect of that for this film –  with realism and respect, and that that inherently limits what they can do when inserting that business into a genre pic, it suggests that the only way to up the horror ante would have been to give in to more judgmental or gore-tastic tactics, and that’s absolutely not the case.  It’s tone, in allowing lead Alice, or her online persona Lola (Madeline Brewer), to pursue a bouncing and spanking career defined by how high you rank against other cammers and to frame it against the day-to-day grind of representation – who you are versus who you present or ‘want’ to be – as opposed to placing it against a tired moral backdrop, makes the intrigue and thrill when Alice finds herself locked out of her cam account by… another Lola, an exact lookalike, definitely more intriguing.  Decades of horror have been littered with sex judgments while dawdling scantily clad ladies at the same conflicting time; Cam doesn’t shy away from naked bodies or from making it clear that this (large) corner of the cam business is driven by the indulgence of tittering girl fantasy, and funded by – at least in part – some less desirable types, and its flat-handed treatment of all of that is refreshing.

But: it leaves a lingering question of what its core concept’s intention is, and what we do with it.  Goldhaber and Mazzei don’t seem quite sure either.  To their credit, they don’t claim to: the movie plays fair with what we know and what it knows, and doesn’t force any conclusions.  It has a beginning, middle, and end, and at no point was I concerned with how my film-time was going to be spent.  That said, if you’re left wondering what the intention was of some of the family squabbling upon Alice’s mother discovering her line of work, or the unexplained relationship with a past acquaintance Alice runs into at the store…

Cam is a great step in an interesting direction, one in which we’re questioning without judging.  Like some other more psychologically themed horror flicks from the past years – It Folllows, Babadook – the movie is using the genre to newly examine some heavy concepts.  But I didn’t like those movies, as I felt like they were ultimately ineffective on various fronts.  Cam is more honest than that, and is a much better movie as a result.  It’s held back – structurally – only because we don’t have any good answers, yet, to the questions it poses, and perhaps we’re still formulating the exact questions as well.