In what appears to be the first mainstream Hollywood movie to focus on the world of camming, the new Netflix original feature Cam sets out to lift the stigma from sex workers, according to the film’s creators—one of whom is a former cam girl herself—and they set out to accomplish that goal in the form of a chilling horror flick.
Starring 26-year-old actress Madeline Brewer, best known as the ill-fated “Janine” in the Hulu streaming series A Handmaid’s Tale, the film explores the creepy events that transpire when a popular cam girl realizes that her online persona has been stolen, and she “sets out to identify the mysterious culprit and reclaim her own identity.”
“Alice, an ambitious cam girl, wakes up one day to discover she’s been replaced on her show with an exact replica of herself,” reads a separate Netflix log line for the film.
We wanted to show a sex worker and have an audience rooting for her, which is rarely, if ever, done in media,” said co-writer and producer Isa Mazzei, in an interview with Playboy online.
Mazzei worked as a cam girl with the film’s director, Daniel Goldhaber—who was also her high-school boyfriend—behind the camera, “as an advisor and artistic director, bringing cinematic qualities to her performances,” according to the horror movie news site Dread Central. The pair brought their own experiences to creating the new Netflix film—but also found that many studio executives were less interested in the film than in Mazzei’s own sex work stories.
“We’re in a professional setting, we’re in a boardroom, and instead of [executives] asking me about the script or the story or about me, they’re asking me about the weirdest sexual act that I’ve ever performed,” she revealed in the Playboy interview. “They would assume that I didn’t write the script, and I said, ‘No, I studied literature in college, I’ve been writing my entire life, I’m a writer.’ But they couldn’t see me as a writer—they could only see me as a cam girl.”
So far, according to the review roundup site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has been well received—though more by critics than audiences. While the site calculates that professional film reviewers give Cam a 94 percent positive score, only 62 percent of the 277 viewers who have voted on the site rated the film a thumbs-up.
Several reviews have compared the film favorably with the British sci-fi/horror series Black Mirror, incuding reviews by Slate.com and The Hollywood Reporter.
“The slow reveal of the day-to-day realities of cam-girling is the movie’s real striptease—all of it surrounded by an aura of authenticity,” wrote Slate reviewer Inkoo Kang. “And though Alice denies that her chosen career has anything to do with a personal sense of female empowerment, the film assumes an unspoken but unmissable feminist consideration of sex work. “
Photo by Netflix YouTube Screen Capture
