Fantasia Festival ’18: Cam

**/****
screenplay by Isa Mazzei
directed by Daniel Goldhaber

by Walter Chaw Daniel Goldhaber's e-take on the doppelgänger mythos via Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," Clive Barker's "Mortal Remains," and that second-season episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "The Case of Mr. Pelham," asks what could happen if the Internet developed the ability to clone anyone once they uploaded enough extant video footage. Of course this is already mostly possible, and of course this new technology's main utility has been creating celebrity-fakes porn–which Cam addresses, though not well. It looks good and hero Lola ("She was a showgirl") is game, but while it threatens at one point to do something like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, it ends up not doing very much with its premise at all. I did like the idea of Lola (Madeline Brewer) getting more viewers by doing snuff porn, but then her identity is stolen by a sluttier A.I. and the rest of the movie neglects to delve too deeply into existential issues, the ins and outs of human kink and what exactly it is that drives these young women into this particular line of work. Cam is ultimately only really interesting for how well it replicates the prurience of the live-chat experience. In that sense, it inspires the same sort of questions that actually watching and participating in a live chat would inspire: are these girls "real"? Are they available? What relationship does this have to the old Paris, Texas peep-show environment? And just what is it about my male wiring that makes watching a girl sit on her bed, pretending to be interested in me, erotic? Cam owes a lot to Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion, down to the play-acting and aspects of the production design, but it doesn't share much of its underneath. There's a good short film here trapped in the body of this feature. For his part, Goldhaber demonstrates some serious chops, and Brewer, armed with an already long list of television credits, is fantastic. I'm curious to see what they do with a more ambitious project. Fantasia Fest 2018 – Programme: Cheval Noir Competition