‘Nerve’ Will Get Your Heart Racing

Would you pay to watch, or play to win?

The shy and introverted Vee (Emma Roberts) would rather do neither, but she’s persuaded by her more extroverted friends to sign up for Nerve - an app that allows “watchers” to suggest dares for their favourite “players”, who can win money if they complete said dare (while live streaming it) in a set amount of time.

Vee’s first dare encourages her to kiss a handsome stranger (played by Dave Franco) who the anonymous “watchers” then suggest that she teams up with. Wanting a little adventure, she agrees, and they head into New York together, where, over the course of the night, they complete a series of increasingly-reckless dares for increasingly-large sums of money.

They’re a popular pairing, and before too long, they have thousands of online “watchers” following their every move.

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There is, however, a dark side to internet fame, and eventually Vee realises that she’s in too deep.

Suddenly, a game that was adrenaline-fuelled, fun and very entertaining (but also palm-sweating, heart-racing, please-get-down-from-that-ladder tense) has become a living nightmare, and as Vee tries to escape it, the social commentary gets laid on a little thick.

We’ve watched enough Black Mirror to know that mob mentality is usually a bad thing, and we don’t need telling that having hordes of people watching your every move, getting off on the increasingly risky situations that you put yourself in (kiss a stranger? how about lie under a ferocious, moving train…) probably isn’t going to culminate with you sitting down with the mob, and having a nice cup of tea…

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But, let’s head back to the fun for a minute. Both Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are likeable leads, and the concept is slick. More so than ever in this age of Pokemon Go, it isn’t too hard to imagine people getting so obsessed with a viral game that they’ll put their lives on the line to win.

Then, there’s the simple fact that not a moment is boring. Whether or not you actually enjoy the scenes of people dangling off buildings (all shot as if through a phone so, you know, you feel like you’re actually there, dangling too) - well that’s a matter of whether or not you like feeling like you’re about to die. But, either way, you won’t be able to tear your eyes away.

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The supporting cast - including Orange is the New Black’s Kimiko Glenn and Samira Wiley (Soso and Poussey) - are strong, and with a fairly short run time, there’s not so much as a minute of Nerve that feels waffly or wasted. Go in expecting your nerves to be wracked, and you’ll leave the cinema happy.

Nerve hits UK screens on the 11th August.