No one is entirely themselves on social media. But what if a clone of your online persona turned into an independent entity, posted to your followers, and caused chaos in your real life? If that sounds like a Lynchian head-trip meets a fucked-up Black Mirror premise, that’s precisely what Netflix is going for with Cam.
The premise of the techno-psychological thriller from Blumhouse is any modern person’s nightmare, but it’s an especially bad one for Madeline Brewer’s Alice. In the neon-saturated first trailer for the film, Alice is a camgirl who relies on a webcam service for work. But one day, she gets locked out of her account—relatable for anyone who sucks at keeping track of passwords. A digital duplicate of her online persona has taken over, and she’s about to make Alice’s life complete hell. Uh, can we please give poor Janine from The Handmaid’s Tale a goddamn break already?
It may seem exploitative to use sex work as the premise for a paranoid horror-thriller, but don’t worry just yet; the film isn’t some demented fantasy from the mind of a horny male screenwriter. Cam is written by a woman, Isa Mazzei, who based the film on her own experiences as a former camgirl. (It is directed by a dude though, first-time feature director Daniel Goldhaber.) The film had its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival, where it garnered a load of positive reviews. The A.V. Club’s Katie Rife described the Hitchcockian thriller as “a feminist update on David Lynch and Brian De Palma by way of Unfriended.”
Cam arrives on Netflix on November 16. Now’s a great time to make sure you have two-step verification turned on—unless you want psycho social media clones hacking your profile.