GHOST WEBCAM is a horror movie in which all the action plays out on a computer screen, as people communicate with each other via video calls.
A young man under house arrest chats with a young woman via a dating app. She directs him to the eponymous website, and before long she seems to fall victim to a ghost right on his screen.
There are by now a number of horror movies in this format, and some of them are quite good to excellent: THE DEN (2013), UNFRIENDED (2014), HOST (2020) and this year's THE INVITED (2024), for example. Each of these starts with a unique premise and develops the story in a direction that is not only unexpected but builds on what came before to present an overall coherent story in an entertaining and especially a gripping way.
In this movie, we have a unique and even intriguing premise, but the direction the story takes is neither particularly coherent nor particularly gripping.
I want to be clear that while it is obvious that this is an extreme low-budget film, I am not holding that against it. Rather, I see the main problem with the screenplay. A few more rewrites could have for example made a more coherent connection between events from 30 years before and the present, reduced the "dead time" moments in the film while cranking up the intensity in the latter parts of the film, and made the motivations of the ghost as it relates to the bystanders more plausible (for instance, via surprising plot twists or unexpected connections) while taking the story in surprising directions.
The implausibility that struck me the most was that a ghost with the powers shown in the final scenes would have no need to contact people the way it does.
Since the film is at about an hour pretty short, it may still entertain fans of the genre without overstaying its welcome, but to me it represents a missed opportunity because its biggest problem is not a a lack of money but a lack of ideas.
