Confessions of a Cam Girl (Singer/White Entertainment, Sepia Films. Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In order to watch Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries and Woman in Hiding I’d skipped the initial showing of last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Confessions of a Cam Girl, but I decided to catch up with it on the repeat showing from midnight to 2 a.m. I figured my husband Charles would go to bed while I stayed up to watch it, but he surprised me by staying up with me and we saw it together. The gimmick behind it – the sorry fate of a so-called “web cam girl,” a teenager who sells near-naked or totally naked photos of herself online for “credits” that can be exchange for cash – had already been done by Lifetime at the end of 2017 in Web Cam Girls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/12/web-cam-girls-reel-one.html), and as in that film the lead “cam girl” in this one comes to grief when she actually agrees to meet a client face-to-face instead of just hiding behind the security (although really false security) of an online presence. Confessions of a Cam Girl, directed by Siobhan Devine from a script by Miriam Van Ernst, is that most frustrating of films, a bad movie in which we sense the germ of a good movie trying to come out. The lead character is Kristen Anne Walters (Megan Best), a blonde high-school senior with the sort of innocent good looks pervy men would go for. She’s a good student and does particularly well in English literature, but her real ambition is to be a fashion designer (of course I couldn’t help thinking that in today’s world fashion designers are far more readily employable than English teachers). Alas, Kristen’s parents are dead set on her going to college, partly because neither of them got to go to college themselves. Her dad works graveyard shifts at a factory and her mom (Camille Sullivan) is a supermarket manager; mom went to college but then dropped out when she got pregnant with Kristen.

Kristen has been accepted into a dream program that would enable her to spend six months in Europe, three months in Milan and three months in Paris, studying fashion, but the program costs $10,000, including a $1,000 application fee. Kristen doesn’t have that kind of money and her parents won’t let her tap the college fund they set up for her because they insist it can only be spent on an accredited institution. My husband Charles spotted the plot hole almost immediately – there are plenty of American colleges that offer programs in fashion design and surely Kristen and her parents could have found one for her – and he also wondered whether the program Kristen is aiming for was itself a scam. But I think Miriam Van Ernst wanted us to think it was legit, and the only stumbling block for Kristen would be the cost. So Kristen decides to be a “cam girl” to raise the money for her dream education, at first with her Black best friend Rezia taking the photos and videos for her site until Rezia has second thoughts about what Kristen is doing and the toll it’s taking on her. Kristen also has a younger sister, J. J., who seems to be interested almost exclusively in playing soccer; and a boyfriend at school, Owen Saunders (the genuinely cute Josh Bogert), who dumped his previous girlfriend because he caught her dating a boy from another school. Owen is on the school’s swim team (director Devine doesn’t show us the school’s name but she gives us a lot of shots of its mascot and the banner above the school’s main entrance telling us it is the “Home of the Bobcats!”), and one of his fellow swimmers, Brandon Nichols, as a prank hacks into Kristen’s Web cam account and e-mails her hot videos to every student at the school. But before that happens Kristen has agreed to a face-to-face meeting with her favorite online client, “Frank35,” for which he offered to pay $6,000 – $3,000 in advance and the rest after they get together. While she’s at least luckier than the heroine of Web Cam Girls, who got kidnapped by a human trafficker who turned out to be her school English teacher – Kristen manages to get away, though “Frank35” screams at her and vows revenge as she escapes – one has to wonder about her naïveté about his intentions and just what he was expecting for the $6,000 he was paying her. Later, when her account gets hacked and her fellow students receive her sexy images and photos on their e-mails, at first we think this was “Frank35”’s revenge (at least that’s what I thought it was!) before it turned out to be Owen’s friend Brandon.

Kristen’s life spirals out of control in the predictable ways of Lifetime writers: her grades take a nose-dive, Owen breaks up with her after he decides that what she’s doing constitutes cheating, and her sister J. J. is pissed at Kristen for missing her big soccer match – because she was at a wild party drinking booze out of the bottle (there were the obligatory red Dixie cups on hand but she couldn’t be bothered with them) the night before. At the party she went into a bedroom with Owen and took him aback with the aggressiveness of her sexual advances, and when he rejected her and she got drunk, she collapsed and slept over. Ultimately her mom confiscates her phone and demands her password (which is “3000,” not exactly the most secure one available), but doesn’t think to take Kristen’s laptop. So Kristen is able to alter her phone’s security settings to require facial recognition, which means mom is still unable to open her phone and check her account. But her parents find out anyway because Kristen shot at least one of her images on campus grounds – in the gym, with the “Bobcats” logo clearly visible – and this gives the high-school principal (yet another African-American woman authority figure in a Lifetime movie) authority to convene a discipline committee and consider Kristen’s expulsion. Also, Kristen's parents receive an unposted manila envelope with print-outs of her sexually explicit pics on one side and red lettering on the other with threatening slogans. The movie ends oddly inconclusively: we definitively learn that “Frank35” has been arrested and extradited back East on open charges of child sex abuse (they barked out his real name, which to me sounded like “Warren Heer”) and that Kristen is not going to go on that European fashion workshop even though she made enough money as a cam girl to pay for it herself. In fact, the scumbag is taken into custody just as he's trying to abduct Kristen’s younger sister J. J. after a soccer practice. But it’s unclear whether she goes to college or makes up with Owen; the last time we see them together she’s asked him to take her to the prom, and he’s declined but kept open the option of them dating again.

If there’s a moral to Confessions of a Cam Girl, it’s the sheer amount of misery parents cause their children by trying to use them to live out their own life dreams vicariously. As troubled as we are by Kristen’s naïveté about the world of Internet porn, we really begin to like her (at least I did!) and hate her parents for having put her in this box in the first place. Like so many other over-controlling parents in Lifetime movies (and, dare I say it, in real life as well), the parents have all the sensitivity of concentration-camp commandants and their total indifference to their older daughter’s independent humanity is a thing of ugliness and a profound sorrow to behold. Had Miriam Van Ernst and Siobhan Devine been more sensitive and more grounded artists than they are, they could have developed this aspect of their story far more deeply than they did and created a truly moving drama instead of a typical Lifetime bit of mild, teasing titillation.