Mini Film Review: Nerve

Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost's Nerve is a morality play with much higher aspirations than most. Adapted by Jessica Sharzer from the novel of the same name, by Jeanne Ryan, Nerve takes some of the conventions of modern social media and frames them in a way that is both thoughtful but incredibly accessible. This thoughtfulness is spent following Vee (Emma Roberts), a high school senior who is deep in her shell. Thanks to some provocation and embarrassment by her friend, Sydney (Emily Meade), Vee finds herself impulsively signing up to play NERVE, a sort of digital truth-or-dare. In the course of playing this, she meets Ian (Dave Franco), a motorcycle-riding Casanova with a mysterious past. Together, the two embark on increasingly dangerous dares, all the while getting to the dark heart of the game. 

It would have been incredibly easy to make this movie a paint-by-numbers, lowest-common-denominator piece of cinema. To be fair, it comes a little close to that. Thankfully, it manages to hew just of bland into pure transcendent schlock. The city of New York is painted in neons and broad splotches of color, which pop out during the tightly cut action sequences. There are all the physical artifacts of internet and social media on the literal edges, many scenes being seen through a computer screen or a cell phone. The corners of the app for NERVE has displays for comments and how many viewers each player has. Each of these elements works to further ground this movie into our world. Even more, as the film progresses, we see how different people respond to the game, mirroring our own experiences online. 

Anonymity, and the distance of the internet, can make us far more monstrous online than we are in person. Nerve sets out to, through the guise of an of-the-moment thriller, explore that capacity for ugliness we have within us. The only slight I really have is that it pulls its punches at the end, where it expands out into a Hunger Games-esque kind of dystopian vision. A plan is set into motion, and while its end result is fulfilling, a large part of me wanted it to be a bit uglier and to go much further than it did. At the end of the day, this is a remarkably sharp, incredibly competent film that manages to be deeply of-the-now while not talking down to the, likely, young audience. 

A Few Thoughts on "Taking a Film for What It Is"

On the recently raised subject of "taking a film for what it is", I often wonder how those who say such a thing think about films. How do they examine them after the fact, thinking back on what they saw? In the process of exploring this, I usually have the following series of thoughts:

• What are [INSERT FILM]'s themes?
• How does it go about exploring those themes?
• Did they consider the fact that movies even have themes?
• What do they think "taking a film seriously" looks like?
• Do they think "taking a film seriously" resembles a bunch of stuffy, turtleneck-wearing intellectuals with notepads writing endlessly verbose screeds against some populist piece of media?
• Do they think it is a focus only on the technical aspects of a film and not on the emotional impact?
• Are they not aware of the fact that it's possible to focus on both aspects?
• Are they also not aware of the fact that, in the act of watching a film, they are doing that very thing?
• Are they unaware of the fact that those technical aspects actively affect the emotional impact the film has upon them?
• Are they able to even identify those technical elements?
• What do they think having "a good time" at the cinema looks like?
• Are they aware of the fact that the majority of critics become critics because they love movies so much and want to talk about them and champion them?

I am aware of the fact that this may have come off as a bit elitist, but these are important questions to ask or consider when you watch a movie. I don't want to seem as though I'm telling anyone the "right" way to watch movies, but when someone says that they "take the film for what it is" I'm inclined to wonder how they got to the conclusion of "what the film is."