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Teen thriller set in an online community may have plot holes, but it aces the atmospherics
is out in the UAE now. f you think fanatics are dangerous, with their inclination to wander into traffic, wait till you get a load of the fictional augmentedreality app at the centre of the teen thriller Nerve. Players of the titular game win cash by accepting increasingly reckless dares, delivered via smartphone, in front of a digital audience. But if they make a wrong move, they might become — cue the ominous music — prisoners of the game.
Ridiculous, you say? Well, yes. It’s also intermittently fun, powerfully suspenseful and not as far-fetched as it sounds, which also makes it scary.
This isn’t the first time directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman have had their finger on the zeitgeist. The title of their 2010 documentary Catfish has become synonymous with the act of online misrepresentation.
Now the duo is back with an adaptation (by Jessica Sharzer) of Jeanne Ryan’s young adult novel. The story revolves around high school senior Vee (Emma Roberts), a Staten Island wallflower who wouldn’t dream of signing up for That’s more in the wheelhouse of her brassy best friend Sydney (Emily Meade). But, after Vee’s crush very publicly rejects her, thanks to Sydney’s ham-fisted matchmaking, Vee decides it’s time to take some risks. “Are you a watcher or a player?” the game’s creepy robotic voice asks her. (Watchers, in this case, being the game’s spectators, masterminds and rule enforcers.)
Vee’s first task is to kiss a stranger in a restaurant in return for $100 (Dh367). Luckily, she finds a cute guy sitting at a table alone, reading her favourite book. What a coincidence. Or is it? Since the game has access to her entire online footprint — every book she’s bought, every song she’s listened to — it appears that the incident may have been orchestrated by unseen puppetmasters. Ian (Dave Franco), the dreamboat with whom she has locked lips, is also playing the game, and the two are soon ordered to team up. They hop on his motorcycle and head to Manhattan.
Once there, they are given a new task, which takes them to Bergdorf’s, where they try on clothes and then leave wearing nothing but their skivvies. Next, Vee has to get a tattoo of Ian’s choosing, and then guide him as he drives his motorcycle Emma Roberts in Nerve. at 96km an hour — while blindfolded — through the streets of New York. That’s the first of many slickly shot, pulsepounding sequences, each of which is so riveting that it makes you forget just how preposterous it is.
As predicted, things take a dark turn. Just as Vee starts falling for Ian, she begins to wonder if she can trust him. Meanwhile, the gamemasters keep upping the ante, building toward a climactic life-and-death challenge.
Nerve is exciting, topical and potentially prescient, but it scores no points for character development, and the plot holes are so big that you could, well, drive a speeding motorcycle through them. If you start to consider the logistics of how the game works, its quickly apparent that things don’t entirely make sense. Which watcher, for example, decides on the mission, from what must be thousands of crowdsourced suggestions? And who exactly is authorising money transfers to Vee’s bank account?
Yet Nerve aces the atmospherics. Not only does it evoke the feelings of awkwardness, alienation and excitement that come with being a teenager, but it conjures the kind of suspense that will give your armrests a workout. Being a watcher, it turns out, isn’t quite as passive as it sounds.