Praise for a brand-new horror flick that follows an online sex worker as her identity is stolen is popping up everywhere — from national publications like GQ Magazine to Stephen King’s Twitter timeline.
“Loved CAM, on Netflix,” King tweeted on November 19th. “Great lead performance by Madeline Brewer.”
So what’s the deal with the movie, and why is it resonating so deeply with audiences? (Viewers have it rated positively at 93 percent on the movie ranking website Rotten Tomatoes.)
Colorado Magazine 5280 sat down with filmmakers Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber in a recently published feature piece. In it, Mazzei explained how she pulled from her own experiences working as a “cam girl,” and 5280 reports the project was originally conceived as a documentary. But it was important to Mazzei, the writer, and Goldhaber, the director, to help viewers understand the point of view of the protagonist — and they thought it was best to do that through a narrative genre film.
“We wanted the audience to be inside a sex worker’s head,” Mazzei said. “To feel what that was like.”
“The idea was to understand a teeny little sliver of the vulnerability of having your body naked online,” Goldhaber said. “We think of those things in documentary filmmaking but we don’t think about the ethics of representation in narrative enough.”
Take a look at the trailer below, and log on Netflix to watch it. Just maybe cover up your camera first.
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