New Thriller Is Like Black Mirror for Cam Ladies

In the new thriller Camera, which premieres simultaneously about Netflix and in theaters in Friday, pretty much everything that camshaft girl Alice (The Handmaid’ s Tale’ s Madeline Brewer) fears might happen does. What surprises, though, is the specificity of her fears. Alice is afraid, of course , that her mother, younger brother, and the associated with their small town in New Mexico will discover her night job. And she’ s probably not alone in her worries that a client or two will breach the substantial but understandably not perfect wall that she has built between her professional and personal lives. But most of her days are spent worrying about the details of her work: Does her act push enough boundaries? Which in turn patrons should she cultivate relationships with— and at which others’ expense? Can she ever be online enough to crack her site’ s Top 50?

Alice is a sex worker, with all the attendant hazards and occasional humiliations— which 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 occasional actress and improviser as the sweet but fanciful “ Lola. ” Behind it, she’ s a writer, a representative, and a set custom made. (Decorated with oversize bouquets and teddy bears, the spare bedroom that she uses as her set seems to be themed Barbie After Hours. ) So when the unimaginable happens— Alice’ s account can be hacked, and a doppelgä nger starts performing her act, with less creativity but more popularity— her indignation is ours, also.

The film finds stakes— and a resolution— whose freshness is hard pussy nice to understate.
But Cam takes its period 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 making love work and online focus. The slow reveal from the day-to-day realities of cam-girling is the movie’ s serious 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 bath room visits. ) And though Alice denies that her selected career has anything to do with a personal sense of female empowerment, the film assumes an unspoken yet unmissable feminist consideration of sex work. The disjunct between Alice’ s seeming regularness and Lola’ s i9000 over-the-top performances— sometimes affecting blood capsules— is the idea of the iceberg. More exciting is the sense of basic safety and control that webcam-modeling allows— and how illusory that can become when male entitlement gets unleashed via social niceties.

If the first half of Camera is pleasantly episodic and purringly tense, the latter half— in which Alice searches for her hacker— is clever, original, and wonderfully evocative. A type of Black Mirror for camera girls, its frights are limited to this tiny slice of the web, but no less resonant for that. We see Alice strive to maintain a certain regular of creative rawness, even while she’ s pressured by the machine in front of her to become something of an automaton herself. And versions of the field where a desperate Alice telephone calls the cops for help with the hack, only to become faced with confusion about the web and suspicion about her job, have doubtlessly performed out countless times in past times two decades. At the intersection of industry that didn’ to exist a decade ago and a great ageless trade that’ s i9000 seldom portrayed candidly in popular culture, the film finds stakes— and a resolution— whose freshness is not easy 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’ s i9000 a bravura performance that flits between several realities while keeping the film grounded as the plot changes make narrative leap after narrative leap. Cam’ s i9000 villain perhaps represents extra an admirable provocation than a satisfying answer. But with such naked ambition on display, who have could turn away