In short: Nerve (2016)

High school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) is the sensible – and decidedly too pliable - one in her small group of friends, hiding behind her extroverted friend Sydney (Emily Meade), ignoring the mute pining of her friend Tommy (Miles Heizer), and pining for some quarterback guy herself. She’d never actually say something, of course.

However, things change when her peers pressure Vee into playing a new, mysterious online game named Nerve. Nerve pays its players for filming themselves fulfilling increasingly difficult dares, while another part of its customer base pays to watch and vote and judge. Riding on an adrenaline high, driven on by all filmmakers’ love for the classic cliché of the inhibited person losing all measure of control once she steps out of her rut, and by the fact that the game throws her together with mysterious, brooding hottie Ian (Dave Franco), Vee keeps playing and playing, going from silly to problematic to outright dangerous and cruel dares, only realizing what she’s doing when it is perhaps already too late.

There have been quite a few films attempting to use and/or exploit contemporary social media youth culture (man, do I feel old writing this) for horror and thriller plots, but quite a few of these films fail because it is all too obvious – even to a guy like me born in the late 70s of the last century – that the filmmakers have little clue about how actual teens live their online lives (“Something about the Bookface, right, Jim?”), and therefore can’t but fail trying to comment on it. Going by their filmography, Nerve’s directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their screenwriter Jessica Sharzer are much closer to contemporary teen culture, and are consequently much better suited to evoke it as the basis for their film and comprehending what might be good or problematic about it.

This doesn’t mean that the film has any ambitions at being documentary or being “realistic”; it is more interested in grounding its thriller plot in something close to actual teen experience and then to exaggerate certain elements of it to comment on them. This grounding of course helps the film work as a thriller, too, building a reality whose boundaries can then be tested. Having said that, Nerve’s final act leaves any of that grounding business behind, solving the characters’ problems in ways that are certainly thematically appropriate but have nothing whatsoever to do with how computers are used, programming works, or what “open source” means. However, at this point, the film’s generally clever approach has earned it enough brownie points I feel it has also earned itself the right to leave the realm of plausibility behind.


Particularly since the film happens to be a solid teen thriller, with good acting, excellently paced escalation that usually also resonates thematically, beautiful, pretty damn eye-popping use of 2010s style neon colours and a slick but not vapid direction style. Now, Nerve’s finale is rather too on the nose for my taste (and would have utterly infuriated me by being so on the nose when I was a teenager) but I really think it is an honest and logical part of the film as a whole.