Cam  ★★½

FOR A film based around the internet sex industry, Cam is surprisingly coy.

The lack of sex or nudity in this low-budget horror/thriller doesn’t detract from the film overall, but it’s an interesting choice on the part of the film-maker.

Perhaps they didn’t want the film to appear exploitative or they wanted to subvert the audience’s expectations. Either way, the film appears a little less authentic.

The internet sex industry isn’t what the film is about anyway. Even though it’s main character is a so-called ‘cam girl’, a woman who performs sex acts on a video feed over the internet for money, they could have been anyone in service of the plot which is about cyber identity theft.

In particular, the film explores the practice known as ‘Deepfake’ in which one person’s face can be digitally inserted onto another body, making it seem like you are carrying out certain acts.

Madeline Brewer plays Alice, a young, intelligent and confident woman who happens to have chosen a career as a ‘cam girl’.

Alice enjoys the freedom and money and has cheeky fun with her regular on-line customers who log in every night to watch her ‘show’, communicating with her and between themselves via on-screen posts and pay for acts with tokens.

There is a darker side to Alice’s nightly videocast. She is determined to crack the top 20 cam girls and is resorting to stranger and stranger acts to increase her notoriety, including performing fake suicides.

These actions appear to be attracting both more deviant clients and the attention of rival cam girls. One night Alice tries to log-in to her account and finds it blocked and already in use. Going onto her site she discovers a live video feed that appears to be of her, presumably a case of identity theft.

Alice finds other aspects of her personal life being stolen and gets no satisfaction from her internet account provider or the police and is forced to discover the truth herself.

Where the film goes from here isn’t as intriguing or exciting as the set-up promises, but its exploration of the ability to anonymously  wield life-changing power over another person is interesting and quite frightening.

The film looks low-budget, but director Daniel Goldhaber shows promise with this debut. He also wrote the film along with Isa Mazzei, a former cam girl in real life, who wanted to present a more realistic look at the industry.

She does that, but it doesn’t have a great bearing on the ultimate narrative or the lack of tension in the film’s final act.