Review: Nerve

A sort of mishmash between Pokémon Go, Gladiator, The Game, and The Hunger Games, the titular mobile application Nerve is a 24-hour game wherein players are made to perform dates crafted by online communities of watchers. There are a couple of rules - all the dares must be captured on the player's phone, the only ways to be eliminated are if you fail or bail, and snitches get stitches. Stay in the game and you not only get cash and glory but insta-fame as well.

Initially Vee (Emma Roberts) isn't in it for the fame or the money or even the thrill, she just wants to prove to herself and her friends that she's not the shy wallflower forever sitting on the sidelines. It starts out easily enough - $100 to kiss a stranger in public for five seconds. The stranger turns out to be another player named Ian (Dave Franco), with whom the watchers decide to partner her up. They're dared to drive to Manhattan, try on expensive clothes at Bergdorf's and then make their way out of the store after their own clothes have been taken away by another player. It still seems like silly shenanigans, but the dares become increasingly dangerous as does Ian, whose past experience at playing the game may be detrimental to Vee's safety.

It's not that Nerve is particularly bad, but its glowstick-coloured, po-faced ridiculousness is a bit too much to take at times. It may be a generational thing, but it's also the simple fact that as a high-school thriller, it isn't especially thrilling though there are tough to watch scenes such as a player lying down on tracks and waiting for the oncoming train to speed above him. Neither does it work as a variation on the Cinderella/She's All That tale, wherein our heroine's passivity blooms into confidence.

However, it does present salient observations on how today's generation interacts with technology and how they are both engaged and removed from it. The players may be in the game, but it is the watchers who control it. Anonymity, as directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Catfish) point out, emboldens you and deludes you into believing you are absolved of any responsibility. Peer pressure and the will of the mob are ever more prevalent and if you're hungry for fame, then you'll do what it takes. The finale demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Centuries may have passed and technology may have improved, but audiences get their reality shows one way or another.

Nerve

Directed by: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman

Written by: Jessica Sharzer; based on the novel by Jeanne Ryan

Starring: Emma Roberts, Dave Franco, Emily Meade, Miles Heizer, Kimiko Glenn, Colton Baker, Marc John Jefferies, Samira Wiley, Juliette Lewis