Webcam models, who livestream erotic performances for a paying audience, can’t afford to be queasy about the risks or nastiness of internet culture. Their audiences’ gaze (along with covetous commentary) is the source of their livelihood, driving a 20-year-old, multibillion-dollar industry. To succeed, cam models walk a near impossible line: bringing voyeurs close enough to feel special, but not close enough so that they’re dangerous.

It’s that Molotov cocktail of need and desire, fear and flattery, caution and ambition, intimacy and anonymity, real and digital space that Netflix’s low-budget horror movie Cam sets alight.The thriller follows Alice (Madeline Brewer from The Handmaid's Tale), a cam girl striving to break into her platform’s Top 50 rankings. She performs under a pseudonym, and has a clear set of boundaries—no public shows, no saying "I love you," no fake orgasms. But soon, Alice breaks her own self-imposed rules by participating in a public show, and finds herself unable to log back into her account. Her account, her audience, her money have been usurped by a doppelganger, and the rest of the film centers around Alice's fight to regain control.

Technically, Cam is far from perfect. The first act oscillates between absolute horror and sleepy small-town drudgery, and I found the ending laptop-flippingly unsatisfying. But its strength lies in its specificity, and oddly enough for a maybe- or maybe-not supernatural thriller, its realism. Cam’s lens on Alice’s sex work is never judgmental: Instead of playing up the industry’s shock value, it correctly portrays it as an internet subculture, a kind of mirror-universe YouTube. Cam might not be a great movie, but it feels like an important movie. Alice’s problems, Cam reveals, are the internet’s.

Sex workers in movies are seldom nuanced. They are a punch line, a decorative object of the male gaze, a cautionary tale that will end with worker justly punished by addiction and/or death. But Cam dodges just about every crappy trope about sex workers you’ve even seen on screen, and for good reason: The screenwriter, Isa Mazzei, is a former webcam model and the movie’s director, Daniel Goldhaber, used to direct some of her more traditional online porn. The films best scenes brim with complex, morally ambiguous tensions. In Cam’s first scene, Alice’s watchers goad her into slitting her own throat. Blood pours onto a fuzzy rug and she falls backwards, only to sit back up and peel away the gash with a grin. She was gleefully in control the whole time, and unbothered by the patrons who got off on watching her violent “death.” Her ratings (and earnings) spike.

Mainstream internet celebrities, especially YouTubers, have commandeered that same “do it for the views” attitude. (That’s in part because webcam models and other sex workers actually helped set the norms for a variety of social media platforms.) Anyone on social media can relate to the need to constantly top oneself to stand out in a bustling digital crowd. Shock and awe is a good but risky way to do that. Just ask Logan Paul. Or Jake Paul. Cam’s world even includes saboteurs attempting to leverage their own clout to turn Alice’s audience against her—a common technique among social influencers trying to boost their own numbers by eliminating the competition on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. The ceaseless pressures of the attention economy are consistent webwide.

So too are Alice’s struggles with online and offline identity. The doppelganger who hijacks her feed, whose face occasionally warps and glitches out into pixels under pressure, is a nightmare version of the deepfake—technology that can near seamlessly graft one face onto another body, often for pornographic purposes. For Alice (and for many victims of nonconsensual pornography), attempting to explain the crime being committed to the police is met with not only confusion, but misogyny. Our offline society doesn’t even have the vocabulary to talk about the crimes of our digital reality, let alone the legislation to combat them. Cam never makes it clear whether Alice’s doppelganger is truly an algorithm gone wrong or a split in her own identity, which is frustrating but also a thinly veiled metaphor for a common internet woe: the feeling that who you are online is disconnected from reality.

Cam succeeds in conveying the connections between Alice’s world and the world most watchers know without oversimplifying or growing preachy. Everything in the movie just is, and it’s up to the viewer to make meaning of the woozily lit deluge of chats and video clips and seminaked women lounging on giant fuzzy teddy bears. It may not be the most satisfying picture, but it sure does feel a lot like being on the internet at 2 o’clock in the morning. The movie doesn’t have to be consistently entertaining as long as it depicts its world with clear, open eyes.

Clarification (November 15, 2018, 1:30 PM ET): This article has been updated to clarify the type of online pornography that Daniel Goldhaber directed.