CAM (2018)

Summary:

Alice, a cam girl going by the online persona of Lola, strives to get in the top 10 streamers on a cam girl site. She plays up the shock value to make herself stand out, and even pretends to kill herself for the theatrics. As her rank increases, she finds out that there’s a carbon copy or complete digital clone of herself who stole her channel, and started impersonating her. Alice does everything she can to figure out how this happened, and how she can put an end to it.

Review:

This film seemed like a long Black Mirror episode to me. It shows off the troubles of current to near future technology and the horrors of it. I found this film entertaining, but not the best. I didn’t feel the need to pause it or step away from viewing the film, but I’d rather stick to watching Black Mirror.

What immediately hooked me into watching the film was the opening scene, which brought the shock value. It starts out with Lola live streaming to a group of thirsty customers, who would send Lola money for action requests. One of her patrons asks her to play with a knife and cut herself, specifically to “cut her pussy open.” Lola treats it as a joke, but then pulls out a knife and slits her throat. She commits suicide on camera, and blood drips down her limp body. Right after we find out that she gets her fans from over the top suicides and theatrics. I thought this was interesting, because it also shows off the dark side of human nature, how these men get off at her killing herself.

The consumer characters/ fans of Lola like Tinker and Barney were interesting to me, because you can see the types of men who love her. She would lean on them at times to help her, but we also see the differences in how they’d treat her being a cam girl. Both were absolute creeps, but Tinker is a complete simp who studied the cam girls so much to the point where he knew he program would copy Lola. Even though Tink knew of this issue, he wouldn’t speak up because it didn’t affect him.

Some of the best scenes in my opinion were the family party scene, and the scene with the cops coming to answer her calls. I enjoyed these scenes mainly, because of the intense humiliation aspect and frustration. You really feel for the character at these points.

In the party scene, her brother has all of his friends come to their mother’s house to celebrate his birthday. Alice has kept her online persona and the fact that she does adult videos away from her mother and people in her outside life. Some of the teen boys at her brother’s party found her cam profile and snicker about the fact that she does porn. The whole scene was suspenseful, waiting for the bomb to drop and have Alice exposed for who she really is. Before they gather around to cut the cake, her brother is frustrated and fights one of the boys for their phone. When the phone drops and her mother sees her daughter’s profile, she’s at loss of words. Alice leaves the house in embarrassment and honestly you feel bad for her, but also for her brother.

The scene with the police is also frustrating, because they don’t take her seriously when she calls for help. This scene and the party scene both have people mock her due to her profession. When she asks the cops to help her, they look the other way, dismiss her, and even flirt with her. This left Alice to solve her issues on her own.

Moments like that in the film, reminded me of Law and Order episodes, and even the film Lost Girls where we have people not taking sex workers too seriously and prioritizing “respectable professionals.” I felt that combined with the technology horrors was successful, because technology can be scary to everyone, especially with intelligent programs. How would one break the system, especially without any help? This was the main factor that made the film interesting to me.

There were some parts of the film that were very intriguing, and made me feel emotional towards the characters. But after watching the film, I was left with several questions.

How did the program copy her body and personality exactly? Is there someone behind the intelligent program who is overseeing this? If she went through all of that trauma, even breaking her nose, to break the digital impersonation of herself… Why continue streaming on that site?

Overall, the film was interesting, but I wouldn’t watch it again. I think it would’ve been more successful if it was shorter. Maybe if it was the length of a 30 minute episode containing the heightened aspects of strange human nature and technology horrors, instead of dragging out the story.