New Thriller Is Like Dark Mirror for Cam Women
New Thriller Is Like Dark Mirror for Cam Women
In the new thriller Camera, which premieres simultaneously about Netflix and in theaters on Friday, pretty much everything that camera girl Alice (The Handmaid’ s Tale’ s Madeline Brewer) fears might happen does. What surprises, nevertheless, is the specificity of her fears. Alice is scared, of course , that her mom, younger sexy horny women brother, and the rest of their small town in New Mexico will discover her night job. And she’ s probably not alone in her worries that a buyer or two will breach the substantial but understandably not perfect wall that she has designed between her professional and private lives. But most of her days are spent worrying about the details of her work: Does her work push enough boundaries? Which patrons should she enhance relationships with— and at which others’ expense? Can your woman ever be online enough to crack her site’ s Top 50?
Alice is a intimacy worker, with all the attendant risks and occasional humiliations— and this moody, neon-lit film under no circumstances shies away from that simple fact. But Alice is also an artist. In front of the camera, she’ s a convincing actress and improviser as the sweet but fanciful “ Lola. ” Behind it, she’ s a writer, a home, and a set artist. (Decorated with oversize bouquets and teddy bears, the extra bedroom that she uses as her set seems to be themed Barbie After Hours. ) So when the unimaginable happens— Alice’ s account is definitely hacked, and a doppelgä nger starts performing her act, with less inspiration but more popularity— her indignation is ours, also.
The film finds stakes— and a resolution— whose freshness is difficult to understate.
But Cam takes its time getting to that mystery. That’ s more than fine, as the film, written by previous webcam model Isa Mazzei and first-time director Daniel Goldhaber, immerses us in the dual economies of sex work and online focus. The slow reveal from the day-to-day realities of cam-girling is the movie’ s true striptease— all of it surrounded by an aura of authenticity. (Small-bladdered Alice, for example , constantly apologizes to her clients for the frequency of her bathroom visits. ) And though Alice denies that her picked career has anything to do with a personal sense of female empowerment, the film assumes an unspoken nevertheless unmissable feminist consideration of sex work. The disjunct between Alice’ s seeming regularness and Lola’ s over-the-top performances— sometimes affecting blood capsules— is the hint of the iceberg. More interesting is the sense of security and control that webcam-modeling allows— and how illusory that can become when individual entitlement gets unleashed out of social niceties.
If the first half of Cam is pleasantly episodic and purringly tense, the latter half— in which Alice searches for her hacker— is clever, resourceful, and wonderfully evocative. A type of Black Mirror for cam girls, its frights will be limited to this tiny slice of the web, but no less resonant for that. We see Alice strive to maintain a certain standard of creative rawness, at the same time she’ s pressured by machine in front of her for being something of an automaton himself. And versions of the arena where a desperate Alice message or calls the cops for improve the hack, only to come to be faced with confusion about the internet and suspicion about her job, have doubtlessly played out out countless times before two decades. At the intersection of the industry that didn’ big t exist a decade ago and a great ageless trade that’ s seldom portrayed candidly in popular culture, the film finds stakes— and a resolution— whose freshness is hard to understate.
The wonderfully versatile Coffee maker, who’ s in virtually every scene, pulls off essentially three “ characters”: Alice, Alice as Lola, and Bizarro Lola. It’ h a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot changes make narrative leap following narrative leap. Cam’ s i9000 villain perhaps represents more an admirable provocation compared to a satisfying answer. But with many of these naked ambition on display, who also could turn away