SHADOWS Contactless: May 15 8.30 Netflix Party: CAM

Have you ever had your credit card hacked? Ever been impersonated on Facebook? Bother have happened to me. Initially, the sense of panic freezes your thoughts and the first thing to cross your mind is that the thief is the one they'll believe, not you, the original. When that passes and you begin the reversal process, calling the bank, warning your social media friends, and your reason returns, you will still remember how little it took to throw you into chaos. Now imagine that happened at work.

Alice is a cam girl. She performs for an audience she never sees who comment in a chat sidebar and pay her to do things. Her audience is male, at the numberless nerve endings at the other end of the web cam. The greater the dollar count, the more extreme the act. Alice knows her job and is good at keeping things this side of bad. But then she hears about herself going much further. So far, this could be another doppelganger story. But we're dealing with bigger impacts, here. This doesn't have the intimacy of The Double or William Wilson, it's global and the stakes are rising as the ever hungry spectators, safe in their own bedrooms, grow in numbers and only want more.

Co-writer Isa Mazzei drew from her own time as a cam girl and was initially interested in making a documentary. But the more the writing team thought of it the more they knew they needed the realm of fiction and its devices to tell the tale. While this is only one aspect of the cam girl's lot pushed to extremes it confronts us with the value we put on her and her choice of profession and how our anonymity allows the illusion of limited involvement. The internet didn't create this it just allowed it to intensify. Owing as much to Klute as the more obvious call of Videodrome, Cam lets us in to where we protest we never tread.