Movie Review: Nerve

Nerve is a movie of the moment, and that moment is, very specifically, July to September of 2016.

Anyone coming to this thing in October may be floored by its quaintness. By November, Nerve might feel like War Games; by December, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

However, if you catch it during its pocket of relevancy, you may find yourself swept up by its frenetic energy, swooping cinematographic bravado and neon-tinged New York landscape. It’s an intoxicating parable, almost as if Gaspar Noé had been hired to make the Pokémon Go movie. (Could happen. They share an accented ‘e’ in common.)

In it, Emma Roberts plays Vee, a hesitant high schooler who signs up to the augmented reality smartphone app ‘Nerve’, mostly to prove she’s not just a passive observer of her own life. Here’s the spiel: The app asks members if they’re a watcher or a player; then, the anonymous watchers flood players with dares of escalating danger and thrill, each with a corresponding payout upon successful completion. Players must film themselves performing the stunt, earning underground notoriety in the process. Her friend Syd (Emily Meade) has quite the following, so Vee picks ‘player’ on a whim as well. Game on.

First, Vee simply has to kiss a stranger. She finds herself pashing Ian (Dave Franco), another of Nerve’s players, at a Staten Island restaurant. The watchers then summon them to New York City, where they’re encouraged to streak across Bergdorf’s and ride a motorcycle blindfolded. Over one wild evening, they become celebrities among the game’s innumerable watchers. But as the night wears on, the dares grow more extreme, and it becomes increasingly apparent that the watchers have no interest in Vee and Ian’s budding love story; they’re nudging them towards self-inflicted fatalities.

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman bring serious verve to this story, adapted by Jessica Sharzer from Jeanne Ryan’s YA novel of the same name. Their first feature, Catfish, similarly trafficked in the themes of self-destruction and anonymity on the internet. The common criticism lobbed at that flick – that it was navel-gazing exploitation – is flipped on its head here. The cruelest joke of Nerve’s central app is that it requires players to film their personal exploits, no matter how absurd, or, if the use of both hands is essential (for instance: to hang off buildings). The very idea of a ‘selfie’ is suicidal in Nerve.

That’s not to say Nerve is one long lecture on the dangers of millennials. If anything, it provides a compelling case for our obsession with self-documentation (for Vee, it’s to confirm her existence; for Syd, it’s to validate her empty one; for Ian, well, he’s being blackmailed by nefarious forces, so that’s an outlier). Above all, it’s a fun and funny spoof of FOMO taken to its logical extreme; players just can’t resist accepting each new dare, while watchers are paralysed, unable to turn away from the horrors unfolding before them.

The picture is exhilarating, helped by the enthusiasm and charisma of Roberts and Franco. (Orange is the New Black lovebirds Kimiko Glenn and Samira Wiley have small, underwritten roles as teenage set dressing, yet their presence was noted and appreciated nonetheless.) Not even a silly ending – straight out of early-2000s touchstone The Skulls – could diminish a viewer’s enthusiasm for what precedes it.

Still, we must pour one out for Nerve, which flopped upon its release in the United States back in July. The irony is almost too rich, given it just happened to debut the week Pokémon Go peaked. It comes to Australia just as the game’s popularity begins to wither and die. Hopefully, interest in the movie – and the immediacy of its message – won’t die with it.

4/5

In cinemas September 1. Rated M for mature themes.