High school student exploited by online ‘game’

Nerve (15A)

In 1994, Juliette Lewis went on a blood-curdling spree with Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers, a film that provoked global outrage for its apparent glorification of violence. Now, some 20 years later, she plays the mother of a young girl, Vee, who becomes hooked on a different form of thrill-seeking in a game called Nerve. This calls upon its participants to engage in ever-more dangerous stunts for money as ‘watchers’ egg them on for money from their smartphones.  

Emma Roberts is excellent as Vee. She’s persuaded to take part in the lethal game by her wilder friend Sydney (Emily Meade) but after a few reckless escapades – one of which involves travelling at 60 mph on the back of a motorcycle through busy streets with a blindfolded driver whom she directs from her pillion seat – something that can only be described as a kamikaze manoeuvre.

This is an important film, not only for the manner in which it alerts us to the dangers of similar types of games being played every day on some computer by impressionable youths, but also for the manner in which it shows us that quiet people like Vee can end up outdoing their more boisterous colleagues once the whiff of cordite takes hold.

It culminates in a venue that resembles a latter-day gladiatorial arena as Vee and her partner Ian (Dave Franco) prepare for a duel to the death to satisfy the salivating masses. By now she’s become a virtual prisoner of the game that excited her for so brief a time before making her a victim of its essentially venal nature

Voyeurism

Nerve has the voyeurism of Network, the puckishness of The Game, the frivolous histrionics of Death Race 2000 and the adolescent chicanery of A Clockwork Orange. The one thing I would fault it for is its tame ending.

It takes us down a path that’s all too familiar to those of us who spend any amount of time at all availing of the diffuse blandishments of technology, those of us exposed to internet trolls, cyberbullying, sorority challenges, intrusive hacking or any of the other perils of a world that reaches its nadir in the threats of mass violence put out on Facebook, something we’ve become chillingly aware of in the recent months of terrorist atrocities.

But Nerve chickens out at the end, insinuating that the dangers it so graphically bludgeons us with for 80 minutes aren’t, after all, as frightening as they at first appeared to be.

The fact is that they are. And it’s the responsibility of the co-directors of the film (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) to own up to that fact.

Such a caveat apart, this is a rip-roaring, effects-driven film, not unlike a video game itself in its cacophonous excesses. For most of the time it pummels us with its make-or-break dares, setting our pulses racing before copping out with a romantic resolution that totally betrays its cautionary message. 

Good ***