Director: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring: Emma Roberts, Dave Franco, Emily Mead, Miles Heizer, Juliette Lewis
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 96 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2016

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Rating notes: Mature themes

Sounds as if it is a horror thriller, geared for people leaping from their seats. Not at all. Not at all for the audience, even though some of the characters have to go through some nerve-racking experiences of the “we dare you” variety.

This is definitely a film for younger audiences, practically all of the characters 20 plus or minus and really only Juliette Lewis as Emma Roberts’ mother (reminding older audiences that that is life, actresses who used to be teenagers now portraying mothers) in an older age bracket. This is also a film for audiences who like computer games – except this is a game in real life, played on the streets of New York (or on cranes or scaffolding high above the city streets) watched by an extraordinarily big following on their phones, computers or large screens.

Audiences are meant to identify with Emma Roberts’ Vee (Venus), quite a controlled young woman who tags along with the much more extroverted Sydney (Emily Meade) an ambitious fan of the game Nerve where dares come from a central IT company and people can join up to be watchers or doers. Sydney is a doer – and when the dare is successfully accomplished, substantial winnings are transferred to bank accounts. With an ever-growing audience of watchers, there is extraordinary peer pressure to undergo the dare, which Sydney discovers, trying to cross a ladder over the span between buildings many storeys high.

It is that peer pressure as well as her image of herself that propels Vee to commit herself – to kiss a stranger in a public place. She does and it wasn’t so bad and then she finds the stranger, Ian, Dave Franco, is also a participant in Nerve and off they go to be a team, starting with Vee going into a fashionable store to try on a dress which costs almost $4000.

And on it goes, with ever more difficult dares, including Ian having to ride his motorbike through the New York streets getting up to 60 miles an hour, blindfolded. Vee steers him through this ordeal and on they go, the bank transfers for the dares accomplished going higher and higher. This puzzles Vee’s mother, a hard-working nurse in hospital.

One of the images that might go through an audience’s mind in watching the ever-increasing danger of the dares as well as the increasing number of watchers is that of Roman Empire times, gladiatorial combats, the same crowd-think, urging each other on as well as the combatants. And, in the social media age, cameras are continually on the dares, invalid without their being photographed, but also the most private of conversations between contestants being overheard by thousands, Vee unwittingly making judgement or comments about Sydney which she and all her friends listen into.

Not everyone is happy with Nerve and as the pressure increases, into a literal contemporary gladiatorial arena with guns drawn, the danger and illegality come to the fore, watchers being accused of participating and as accessories to murder.

So, by the end, this is a morality play, critical of young people and their succumbing to peer pressure, the low self-image and capacity for making decisions that means they go along with the dares despite the dangers and irresponsibility, and age of social media, it is very easy to be swept along with the excitement without giving much or any thought to personal or social consequences.