Film Review: ‘Nerve’

A propulsive thriller about a most dangerous game folds

a few sharp observations on the Internet era into a
youth-movie ride.

In “Nerve,” a dark-heart-of-the-Internet thriller made with a glib pop-up glow, Vee (Emma
Roberts), a high school senior in Staten Island who’s the straightest girl in her clique
(though she’s cool enough to know her Wu-Tang by heart), gets sucked up into a sinister
competition that emerges out of the deep web. It’s a game called Nerve that operates
through a smartphone app — though it could just as well have been devised by a savvy
TV producer who loved “Fear Factor” and “The Hunger Games” and ordered up a show
that was a cross between them.
In the movie, anyone who makes the perilous click to play Nerve chooses to be in one of
two groups: players or watchers. The players are the bold ones who act out a series of
dares, which start off as innocuous (jumping onto a motorcycle with a leader-of-the-pack
stranger) and then head toward the shiveringly dangerous (don’t-look-down heights are
a favorite motif). The players receive money for each dare, but more than that, they rack
up followers. They get to know that they’re loved. The watchers, by contrast, are the
passive drone/fans sitting on the sidelines. But they’re also the ones controlling the
whole thing. They think up the dares and become a live audience for them on their
phones and computers, choosing to follow this or that player. Are we not entertained?

At “Nerve,” we are entertained (sort of), by a concoction that’s basically a B-movie

scavenger hunt with a soupcon of “relevance.” It’s like an update of the 1997 David
Fincher thriller “The Game,” only with an ominous hint of this is where the world is
heading! that feels more like “The Purge.” “Nerve,” let’s be clear, isn’t a movie to take
seriously, yet its fast lunge at topicality — the way it uses the contest at its center as a
lightning-rod metaphor for how young adults interact in the digital age — is part of what’s
fun about it. The film was co-directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made the
highly resonant and manipulative 2010 documentary “Catfish” (about the way that
people use fake alter egos on-line). “Nerve,” which is both thin and exciting, contrived
and provocative, is staged as a chain of logistical observations about on-line culture in
the age of Snapchat and Instagram, when people put their entire lives on display, and
what isn’t shown is being data-minded. The movie is cautionary sociology turned into an
ominously propulsive youth-movie ride.
Emma Roberts, with her big dark eyes and toothpaste-commercial smile, is often
compared to her movie-star aunt (Julia Roberts), but in “Nerve,” she’s got a chatty
awareness that makes her seem more like the little sister of Anne Hathaway. As a lead
actress, she’s vividly compelling: vivacious and a little abashed, an oasis of radiant
sanity within a group of kids who are all twitchy nerve endings. The film opens with an
ingenious sequence in which Vee, on her laptop, connects with her wild-girl best friend,
Syd (Emily Meade), amid a sea of on-line bells and whistles. It’s really the film’s
announcement of its theme, which is that in the digital age, “one-on-one” communication
is just another piece of entertainment, another virtual stimulant. No wonder things need
to get daring.
The movie captures how in an all-computer-all-the-time era, it’s inevitable — indeed,
almost evolutionary — that people will be driven to seek out some way to be audaciously
physical, to be out in the world and there. The players act out the hidden desires of the
watchers: a symbiosis of thrill-seeking at once real and vicarious. But Vee, a
photographer who just wants her mom (Juliette Lewis) to allow her to attend the
California Institute of the Arts, has more romantic inclinations. She’s got a secret crush
on J.P (Brian Marc), a star jock, and when the anything-goes Syd approaches him in
front of a crowd on her friend’s behalf, the result of this badly misjudged transaction
sends Vee into a spiral of humiliation.
How bad a spiral? So bad that she enters a “What the hell” zone that suddenly leads her
to sign up on Nerve as a player. It’s not really too plausible — but hey, it’s the movie’s
whole damn premise, so why fight it? Vee’s first official dare is to visit a diner and kiss a
stranger for five seconds, and once she gets there she sets her sights on Ian (Dave
Franco), whose face is buried behind a paperback copy of “To the Lighthouse.” That
turns out to be no coincidence. On Facebook, Vee had listed Virginia Woolf’s novel as
her all-time favorite. The game is already parsing her tastes! Reading her mind! The
follow-up dare involves her pairing off with Ian, who choppers her into Manhattan, where
the two stop off at Bergdorf Goodman and — next dare — she tries on a skimpy couture
dress that looks like it was made out of a crushed emerald-green Christmas ornament.
Then their clothes get stolen (which turns out to be the dare of someone else). They
scamper out of the department store in their underwear, and from there things just get
sketchier.
Which is how we want them to go. “Nerve” takes a moment to recover from a flagrantly
ridiculous sequence in which Ian, on his motorcycle (with Vee as designated driver), tries
to hit a speed of 60 miles per hour in Manhattan while blindfolded. But that’s a rare
instance of fake badassery. Dave Franco, with a buzzcut that brings his features into
focus, comes off as a less moonstruck, more vulnerable version of his brother James.
He and Roberts find a romantic connection that threads its way through the movie, and
stays there even when Vee is walking on a ladder lodged between apartment windows
twelve stories above ground. Joost and Schulman do a terrific job of staging this
vertiginous sequence. It works as the ultimate bad dream of peer pressure — the notion
that this is how far someone will go to please her followers. In “Nerve,” the rule of the
Internet mob is all-powerful: You want something because everyone else wants it, and
their will becomes yours, a dynamic that can leave your very identity hanging in the air.
The cinematography, by Michael Simmonds, is sharply angled and glowing and alive,
with a haphazard touch of YouTube visual flash. But there’s nothing very spontaneous
about the conspiratorial doom that drives the action forward. As the game of Nerve goes
on, the watchers egg on the players, who are all too eager to become stars, but really
they’re sacrificial lambs. At certain points, watchers will conveniently pop up along the
streets, strategically placed to broadcast what’s happening through their phones and
action cameras, an image of all-eyes-on-you paranoia that may produce a shrug of
“Yeah, right.” “Nerve” is a comic-book vision of how the Internet has become a
gladiatorial arena of voyeurism. But the movie, like the game it’s about, is hard to stop
watching, even when you know it’s playing you.