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USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
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‘Nerve’ is Fun Until it Becomes a Thriller

The film is ultimately pretty silly, but it has just enough of a shade of relevance to make it something worth considering, even if the pieces don’t all fit.

Nerve follows Vee (Emma Roberts), a high school senior who at the start of the movie is introduced as someone averse to taking any kind of risk. She is basically cajoled into joining Nerve, an online game where players are made to accomplish increasingly difficult dangerous dares and film them on their phones in exchange for monetary rewards. At first, Vee is just out to prove her friends wrong, but she becomes drawn deeper into the game with the help of another player, Ian (Dave Franco). Vee starts to have fun playing, but soon enough she learns of the game's darker side.

The story takes a look at current online culture and attempt to take it to a logical extreme. It builds its story on the platform of what people are already doing now: sharing so much of their daily lives online for the sake of receiving of the validation of strangers on the Internet. It simplifies things by positing a very basic relationship of exhibitionists being egged on by anonymous watchers. The film is ultimately pretty silly, but it has just enough of a shade of relevance to make it something worth considering, even if the pieces don’t all fit.

It feels like kismet for Nerve to arrive so soon after the release of Pokemon Go, an app that while much more benign, has already made headlines for how dangerous it is. In this way, Nerve is fully immersed in the zeitgeist. Its game, though pretty ludicrous, doesn’t really seem that many steps removed from Nintendo’s juggernaut. It is a game that has young people heading to locations, completely tasks that will likely baffle anyone not in the know. If nothing else, the film captures the rush of accomplishment that comes from taking part in something like this. The tasks themselves might be frivolous, but there is a dopamine response triggered by the simple affirmation that these games can bring.

The film is fun to that extent. Watching these characters take on increasingly difficult tasks is oddly satisfying, and in the periphery, the movie does reveal something dark about the transactions that take place online. But it still isn’t actually the stuff that good thrillers are made of. The film goes off the rails once it moves on from simply implying its threat to making it tangible. The film’s third act brings an element of polemic that this story just isn’t equipped to support. The movie’s connection to reality becomes far too tenuous to earn the statements that it puts into the mouth of its heroine. And the practical components of the resolution are pure nonsense.

But for a good long while, the film is a pretty good time. It helps that co-directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost bring so much style to the table. It is a little overwhelming at times, but all the digital overlays and the occasional phone camera style footage really places the film in the now. Emma Roberts really shouldn’t be playing a high school senior at this point, but she’s still a terrific actress with real presence. She isn’t able to sell the big message, but that really can’t be blamed on her. She plays well off Dave Franco, who excels at being a friendly face that might have something dark lurking just underneath that wide smile.

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Nerve falls apart as it moves deep into thriller territory. It loses something as it tries to make the players victims, rather than complicit participants in a binary online relationship. The film clearly struggles to find a big ending for its story, a traditional battle between right and wrong. And it doesn’t work. As logistically improbable the central conceit may be, its first two acts is a fairer depiction of the perils of the Internet, of the kind of things that people do for the kind of attention that the Internet can bring.

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Movie Info

Nerve
Crime, Mystery, Thriller
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4.1/5
20 users
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Critic's Rating
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