Nerve (2016 film)

Nerve is a 2016 American techno-thriller adventure film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and written by Jessica Sharzer, based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Jeanne Ryan. The film stars Emma Roberts, Dave Franco and Juliette Lewis, and revolves around an online objective truth or dare video game, which allows people to enlist as "players" or "watchers" as the game intensifies.

The film premiered at the SVA Theater on July 12, 2016 and was theatrically released on July 27, 2016, by Lionsgate. Nerve received praise for its energy and the chemistry of its cast, and grossed $85 million worldwide against its $19 million budget.

Plot
High school senior Venus "Vee" Delmonico longs to leave Staten Island for college, but is afraid to tell her mother about being admitted to the California Institute of the Arts, as she is still grieving from the death of her older brother. Her friend Sydney becomes popular in Nerve: an online reality game where people either enlist online as "players" or pay to watch as "watchers". Players accept dares voted on by watchers, receiving monetary rewards, trying to become the winner of that day.

When Sydney chastises Vee's unadventurous nature, Vee signs up as a player. The game explains that all dares must be recorded on the player's phone, that earned money will be revoked if a player is knocked out by failing or bailing on a dare, and "snitches get stitches."

Vee's first dare is to kiss a stranger at a diner. Vee goes to the diner with her friend Tommy, and kisses Ian. Ian starts dancing around the diner and sings to Vee on a dare, revealing he's another player. The watchers dare Ian to take her into Manhattan. Vee accepts and rides with Ian on his motorcycle.

In Manhattan, the pair are dared to try on expensive formal attire. When their street clothes are stolen, the watchers dare them to leave the store, so they strip off the fancy clothes and flee in their undergarments. They return to Ian's motorbike, where they find the expensive clothes, paid for by the watchers.

Vee is dared to get a tattoo chosen by Ian. Ian is next dared to ride his motorbike through the city blindfolded at 60 mph, using Vee to steer his body; once completed, the two kiss. Vee and Ian soon become among Nerve's top players.

Jealous at Vee's rise of popularity, Sydney accepts a dare to walk across a ladder suspended between two buildings. Sydney bails out, getting eliminated from the game. Ian takes Vee to Sydney's party and Vee catches her making out with J.P., a boy Vee likes. After Vee and Sydney have a major argument, Tommy reveals that he was watching Ian's profile; Ian had accepted a dare to make Vee and Sydney fight. Vee realizes that game players could die and reports the game to a nearby policeman, but he doesn’t believe her. As punishment, all of the money is depleted from her family’s bank accounts. Highly ranked player Ty accepts a dare to knock her unconscious.

Vee wakes up in a metal shipping container with "snitches get stitches" on the walls. She escapes and finds Ian, who confesses that he and Ty were players whose friend was killed in a dare. When they tried to alert the authorities, their families' jobs, bank accounts, and identities were confiscated. Vee has now joined them in the secret third category of the game: "prisoners". If a prisoner can reach and win the day’s final round, they regain everything.

Vee, Tommy, and Sydney recruit Tommy's hacker friends to alter the game's online code, but it is impossible to simply shut down Nerve, as all the watchers phones act as a distributed server.

Vee and Ian earn the two spots in the final dare, which takes place at Battery Weed. The winner will be whichever one shoots the other with the handguns they’ve been given. Ian offers her the win, but when she also refuses to shoot, Ty jumps from the audience to take Ian's place. The watchers then dare Ty to kill Vee, for the win. He immediately shoots her, and she dies in Ian's arms.

Just then, Tommy and his hackers modify Nerve's source code to decrypt the watcher's code names and send them a message: "You are an accessory to murder". All watchers immediately log out, closing down the game's servers and effectively ending it. Ian aims his gun at Ty and Vee suddenly sits up, revealing that she and Ty had staged her murder to scare the watchers into disbanding Nerve. Tommy's hacker friends restores the stolen money and identities.

A few months later, Vee and Sydney have reconciled, Vee and Ian are a couple, and Vee is attending California Arts. Ian reveals his real name to be Sam whilst another person is secretly recording them on their phone.

Cast

 * Emma Roberts as Vee, a player of Nerve.
 * Dave Franco as Ian, Vee's fellow player.
 * Emily Meade as Sydney, one of Vee's friends.
 * Miles Heizer as Tommy, one of Vee's friends and has an unrequited crush on her.
 * Juliette Lewis as Nancy, Vee's mother.
 * Kimiko Glenn as Liv, one of Vee's friends.
 * Marc John Jefferies as Wes
 * Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) as Ty, Vee's main opponent in the game.
 * Brian Marc as J.P.
 * Samira Wiley as Hacker Kween, one of Tommy’s hacker friends.

Canadian artist Chloe Wise and YouTube celebrity Casey Neistat, both New York City based, appear briefly as Nerve players.

Production
Directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost had previously dealt with similar themes in their documentary Catfish. On their attraction to a film based around the Internet, they stated, "Most things aren’t black and white. The Internet is neither good nor bad; it just depends on how you use it", giving the example that the Nerve game could be both "a really empowering game, and it’s also the most awful thing that you can possibly imagine". The directors strived for a PG-13 rating, with Schulman stating "we wanted to make sure that younger teenagers could see it. We think it has an important message and they’ll dig it", with Joost adding "We weren’t interested in making a gross torture movie". In trying to keep the rating down, the directors axed a "sex dare" that "was ultimately just too dark and weird". The film has also a lighter ending and theme than the book, as the novel deals with a much darker plot and ending. The team stated that the fast-changing nature of the Internet made it a tough subject to make a narrative feature about, with Joost noting that the app Periscope came out during the film development, which Joost called "like half-way to being Nerve".

In January 2015, it was announced that Emma Roberts and Dave Franco were set to star in the film. In April 2015, it was announced that Kimiko Glenn had joined the cast of the film, portraying the role of Emma Roberts' character's worried friend. The same day, it was announced that rapper Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker had also joined the cast.

Filming
Principal photography on the film began in 2015, in New York City. Production on the film concluded on June 5, 2015.

Release
The film premiered at the School of Visual Arts in New York City on July 12, where the cast attended. It was also screened on July 21 at Comic-Con. The film was originally scheduled for September 16, 2016, but was eventually theatrically released on July 27, 2016.

Box office
Nerve grossed $38.6 million in the United States and Canada, and $46.5 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $85.2 million, against a budget of $19 million.

The film was projected to gross around $10 million in its opening weekend and $15 million over its first five days from 2,538 theaters. The film grossed $3.7 million on its opening day and ended up finishing 8th at the box office in its opening weekend, grossing $9.4 million (a five-day total of $15.5 million).

Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 66% based on 133 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Nerve's fast pace and charming leads help overcome a number of fundamental flaws, adding up to a teen-friendly thriller with enough energy to occasionally offset its muddled execution." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 58 out of 100 based on 33 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

Scott Tobias of Uproxx wrote, "Though the ending surrenders to a tsk-tsk-ing morality play that turns on the mob the game (and the film) has so smartly orchestrated, Nerve is the rare virtual thriller that understands how social media actually works and the addictive little subcultures that can spin out of it." Dave Palmer of The Reel Deal gave the film 7/10, saying, "It is a lot of fun, and not even in a turn-your-brain off kind of way. The film actually has some smart things to say about teenagers, their phones and what people will do to get internet famous and it is all delivered in a colorful little package."