Warning: This article contains spoilers for Cam.

Recently, I finally got around to watching Cam. I have a lot to say about this movie, but my biggest takeaway is that I absolutely loved it. Isa Mazzei’s script is confronting and thought-provoking while never losing the sensibility and care at its heart. Walking away from a horror movie in a genuinely, unambiguously good mood is a rare thing, and Cam brought me there.

Let’s rewind a little. Now, it bears mentioning that Cam might not appear as overtly queer as Jennifer’s Body, which I looked at last week. However, it does center on an experience of femininity that is rarely seen and even more rarely valued in horror cinema. The driving force behind the movie is women and their relationships with (and to) each other in the world of sex work. To say nothing of the fact that the script is undoubtedly inflected by Isa Mazzei’s identity and experience as a queer woman. Ergo: it belongs in this series.

Cam centers around Alice Ackerman, a young woman who regularly performs as a camgirl, under the online alias of Lola. She is passionate about her work and is constantly challenging herself to do better, aiming hard to climb the ranks on the site she works from and gain recognition as a fan favorite and big earner. Just as she starts to reach these goals, though, something goes desperately wrong. Her name, face, account, and ultimately her identity are taken over by a replica, locking her out of everything she’s been working so hard to achieve.

We spend the first half hour of the film simply entering into Alice’s life. We see the amount and type of work and preparation that goes into her sex work, as well as her interactions with friends and family. This is greatly valuable on its own, as it grounds us within Alice’s essential humanity while also affirming that sex work is about a lot more than just taking your clothes off for money.

Indeed, a big part of Mazzei’s aim with this movie was to abandon over-trodden horror tropes where, if sex workers are present at all, they generally exist to be the first to die and are effectively punished for what they do for a living. Certainly they don’t have personalities or families to speak of.

Alice is a major breath of fresh air, and Madeline Brewer’s delivery of the multiple roles she carries in this movie really drove the point home. Alice is ambitious and outspoken about her expectations and her boundaries. She’s funny and sweet, yet also lonely and self-conscious. She’s put hours into decorating the room that she works from but many of her other belongings are still in moving boxes.

She tracks her camming schedule religiously on her calendar — what she did on which night, and how many tips and credits she earned — and shows up late to her brother’s birthday party. She’s deeply proud of how much time she’s put into her cam work, but lies about it to her family.

Meanwhile, we see that Lola is both part of Alice and an embellishment. She has inside jokes with her fans and patrons that speak to Alice’s own sense of humor, and she channels a brightness and cavalier boldness that Alice doesn’t necessarily display in her offline life.

Lola is a carefully crafted persona, put together through extensive examination and study of what other camgirls are doing to succeed, and in many ways is an idealized version of Alice herself. This is an experience Isa Mazzei speaks to in her memoir, Camgirl, as well. Even Lola, though, feels fleshy and real. She makes jokes that don’t quite land with her fans, or she gets glitter stuck in her hair, or she has to get an eyelash out of her eye on screen.

The most significant takeaway from this early segment of the film, I think, is how easily we can relate to Alice. She is bursting with very human, accessible traits and habits, and we are solidly grounded with her well before anything even starts to go awry. This shapes our understanding of the rest of the movie, and the place we reach together with Alice by its end.

The particular development of the Lola persona hits home in particular ways, too. Watching Lola at work of course pivots on the focus, determination, expense and at times even athleticism involved in camming. However, it also speaks to anyone with a significant online presence. Many of us who are active on social media are often well aware that we script ourselves in particular ways, to be perceived and interacted with along specific lines, often rooted in an idealized version of ourselves.

Alice’s gradual loss of control over Lola is situated in a similar frame as Black Swan and Whiplash, two films that Isa Mazzei confirms inspired her process of writing the script. Cam focuses on the determination and passion Alice has to perform expertly, and the increasing extremes to which she’s willing to go for that goal.

By watching the heights to which our protagonist pushes herself through Alice’s eyes, the camwork she carries out in many ways evokes professional athletes or musicians. Much like Black Swan’s Nina Sayers or Whiplash’s Miles Teller, the determination to be perfect is both pivotal to Alice’s story arc and is embodied throughout the narrative when her online life spins out of her control.

Being that Cam is a movie focusing on a sex worker, it bears mentioning that this movie is not afraid of nudity. I loved, however, that the nudity never felt gratuitous. Alice was naked in scenes where it made sense for her to be naked, and not in others. To the crew’s great credit, they gave Madeline Brewer effectively all the say in how much of her body Alice would or wouldn’t be showing.

Approaching nudity in the film that way creates an organic and respectful treatment of bodies and sexuality that’s rare in the horror genre, and allowed Cam to hit exactly the notes it needed to in order to get its point across. Indeed, because the nude scenes felt so natural, they rarely even registered as “sexy.” We were just talking to Lola while she worked, or watching her perform acts of athletic endurance with the same focus as any ballet dancer or long-distance runner.

Although the script is tightly written and revolves around a fairly small cast of characters, I also loved that Cam didn’t take that as an excuse not to feature a range of bodies. When Alice is studying for her next cam session — i.e., watching other camgirls at work — she flicks through a spread of women of color, thin women, chubby women, all of whom have an online following by which they are admired and wanted. This segment was one of my favorites for its straightforward, no-fuss insistence that sex workers aren’t just thin white women and its rejection of the idea that only these specific types of bodies are attractive.

Even Alice, for that matter, isn’t poster-perfect. Madeline Brewer is gorgeous in a very human way, having big eyes, a slight crook in her nose, hard jawline and a narrow chin. I was looking at and engaging with a very real person, and though Alice had her insecurities about her performance, none of them seemed to be about her looks.

It’s easy to spend all day talking about the visuals of Cam. This movie is stunning, and jarring, and surreal, and beautiful. A great deal of work went into creating sets and environments that feel real and immersive, and they absolutely pulled it off. However, let’s circle back to the story at its heart.

I mentioned earlier that Cam centers on women and their relationships to and with each other. Obviously, Alice is the core around which all of this revolves, though some of our most significant glimpses into her life and her work come through her interactions with other women, both within sex work and outside of it. For instance, she navigates respect and rivalry with fellow camgirls PrincessX and Fox, or walks through a balancing act of trust and withholding with friendly acquaintance Katie who doesn’t know about her sex work.

What’s perhaps particularly interesting is that the most significant relationship with a woman is that between Alice and her mother. Her mom is initially dismayed by the discovery of her daughter’s sex work, then is misguidedly supportive by praising the Lola replica, as opposed to Alice herself. Finally, we see her coming on board with helping her daughter reclaim her online life in a safe way that she owns and controls once more.

Meanwhile, most if not all of the men that make an appearance in Cam are (effectively) plot devices, which is another unusual but refreshing move in a horror genre piece. Male police officers show up when Alice tries to report her identity theft, only to derail and dismiss her through asking increasingly inappropriate questions about her work, something Mazzei herself experienced.

Tinker, a big tipper and major fan of Lola’s, largely exists as a red herring for the tension at the story’s core due to his disrespect for Alice’s boundaries, and a brief expository link before vanishing from the narrative altogether. Barney, another big tipper — Lola calls him her “whale” — serves the function of highlighting Lola’s rivalry with other camgirls before running headlong into a familiar but newly-framed horror trope. Namely, that of men not believing women regarding their own experience, and trying to silence them when they insist.

Needless to say, a great deal of Cam’s vantage point comes about through Isa Mazzei’s own experience in camming. Even down to seemingly smaller details like making sure Alice’s eyelines were correct as she looked between her rank, her camera, her chatroom, and her tips.

As I watched Cam, there were also multiple, repeat instances where I observed, “Wow, this would be so different if it was written by a straight man.” For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I won’t list them all here. If you’ve watched Cam, or you plan to after reading this article — seriously, please watch Cam. — I’d love to know your thoughts on the movie in the comments section below.

One thread that particularly jumped out at me, though, is that the Lola replica (or Lola 2) is soon enough shown to not be the villain. I’ll admit, I’ve been primed by horror in certain ways that I was half expecting her to be some malevolent supernatural entity that had infected the cyberscape, a la Deadcon or Unfriended.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t the case, and that in many ways Lola 2 is sympathetic in her own right. She is taken advantage of and created by something out of her control, and ultimately doesn’t even recognize Lola 1 as her mirror image. There was something unspeakably sad in that revelation — in Alice’s anger for herself and Lola 2 that “she doesn’t know what she looks like” — that I could probably talk about all day. I’ll simply say it stuck with me well after I had finished watching the movie.

This point of the story, admittedly, netted Cam some criticisms from viewers who were disappointed that Lola 2’s existence was never fully explained. I certainly think a movie with other priorities might have tried to wrap that thread up, but personally, it didn’t bother me at all. The technicalities of exactly how Lola 2 came to be were never the point, and I loved that Cam brought us back to Alice rebuilding her online life under a new alias in the end.

Cam aimed to create a story in which we relate to and root for a sex worker. Instead of falling into a cautionary tale about social media or sex work, it carried us to the end cheering when Alice returned to camming, newly invigorated and with the support of her family.

I loved it. Please watch Cam. The girls are great. Isa Mazzei is awesome too. I will probably be talking about this movie all year, or at least until I have something new to talk about next week.

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