Nerve

An extremely stylish and exuberant take on the money-for-dares/dangerous game narrative, buoyed by a brilliant, catchy soundtrack, and propelled along by the beautiful colours of what must be at least half of all the neon lights in Hollywood.

Nerve reminded me of other, not necessarily better, films along the way: Cheap ThrillsThe GameMy Little EyeThe Running ManThe Warriors all probably chief among them. It carves an identity of its own, though. And I’m still thinking about it – and that soundtrack – years later. No-one is more surprised than me by that fact.

It’s not without flaws. I could square it off a dozen ways (none of them particularly satisfactory), but it bugged me that Emma Roberts’ character could [spoiler alert!] join a game like Nerve on what turns out to be the day of the final, with no pre-established social media following to speak of, and become so popular so quickly. Buuuuullllllshit Mr Han, man.

And everybody is into this app. Everybody. Happily the real-life global obsession with Pokemon Go, as evidenced in the world’s news media, completely removes the inedible rind of the cheese-fest that would normally accompany that narrative contrivance. If the film had been released five years earlier I might have been more bothered by that.

But no; my biggest gripe with this film is the way that all the tech works perfectly, all the time. Videos are flung from smartphones to TVs, websites load instantly, service coverage and internal storage memory are both always amazing – all without seeing so much as a log-in screen, password fail, bufferface, error message or instance of a touchscreen doing absolutely fuck all despite numerous taps, shakes and button pressings. No-one ever curses their phone in this film. Ever. Unbelievable.

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