Nerve

Are you a play­er or a watch­er? Venus ​“Vee” Del­moni­co (Emma Roberts) is the lat­ter, a nerdy high-school­er who hides behind her cam­era, snap­ping pic­tures of the dreamy cap­tain of the foot­ball team instead of ever actu­al­ly talk­ing to him. It’s a char­ac­ter we’ve come across count­less times: the qui­et out­sider who pos­sess­es some inde­fin­able qual­i­ty that ele­vates her above her peers – if only they could see it!

Enter Nerve, a high-stakes online game where ​“Play­ers” must film and com­plete dares, sug­gest­ed by an audi­ence of ​“Watch­ers” for an impres­sive cash sum. It’s a game Vee has no inter­est in play­ing – that is, until her best friend humil­i­ates her in front of said foot­ball cap­tain. Sud­den­ly, Vee, the per­pet­u­al wall­flower, is sign­ing up to Nerve as a ​“Play­er”, deter­mined to prove every­one wrong and shed her pas­sive skin.

Ini­tial­ly, the dares are pret­ty tame, But as the sto­ry pro­gress­es and the dares esca­late in their dan­ger, some are gen­uine­ly thrilling. One, which involves hav­ing to cross a lad­der sus­pend­ed between two adja­cent apart­ment build­ings, clev­er­ly incor­po­rates wob­bly, hand-held cam­era phone footage – a lo-fi tech­nique that Cat­fish direc­tors Hen­ry Joost and Ariel Schul­man are no strangers to. This mod­ern re-work­ing of an old fash­ioned movie stunt brings a hack­neyed trope firm­ly back into the 21^st century.

Aside from the thrill of the lad­der scene, one of Nerve’s biggest spills is the cast­ing of Juli­ette Lewis as Vee’s over­worked moth­er. What is some­one as wicked­ly tal­ent­ed as Lewis doing play­ing a bit-part in a sec­ond-rate teen movie? Frankly, this speaks vol­umes as to the crim­i­nal lack of good roles on offer for women over 40 in Hollywood.

But Nerve’s biggest prob­lem is that, much like a con­fused kid in high school, it just isn’t sure what it wants to be. Part gener­ic high school movie, part thriller, part Hunger Games riff-off, com­plete with half-baked aspi­ra­tions to the neon rave aes­thet­ic of Har­mo­ny Korine’s Spring Break­ers, Nerve’s screen­play is far too heavy-hand­ed to car­ry it all off. And this weak writ­ing couldn’t be more evi­dent in the film’s finale. Joost, Schul­man and screen­writer Jes­si­ca Sharz­er could have done some­thing orig­i­nal here, but instead they cave to the sen­ti­men­tal pres­sures of the teen film genre. You might say they lost their nerve.