From the directors of a Paranormal Activity 3 and 4 comes Nerve, a teenage drama trying to capture The Hunger Game‘s lucrative audience. At first glimpse, the movie doesn’t really sound like a must watch. There are no big stars (sorry Dave Franco fans), the directors haven’t worked on anything good, and the premise behind it sounds completely nuts. But I think this movie will end up surprising a lot of people. Before we continue, a quick piece advice to anyone planning to watch: don’t watch the trailers, as they pretty much spoil the entire flick.

Nerve is a video game that brings The Hunger Games to our world. Gamers pick to be watchers or players; watchers pay to watch their favorite players, and the money is pooled and used to pay the players on completing more and more insane dares. The watchers vote amongst themselves to decide what the next dare should be, and at their disposal is the social media accounts of the players. From there they can pick out dares relating to their players’ greatest fears and pit friends against each other.

We follow a shy high school senior named Venus who’s looking to take more risks in her life, and after being pushed by her friend Sydney, she joins Nerve as a player. Dave Franco’s character Ian is another player in Nerve and joins up with Venus.

The movie provides a look at problems with privacy in the current world and the harmful internet culture built from anonymity. Even the watchers’ conversations sound like something straight out of 4chan. More than all of that, the movie is all about some good old teenage drama.

All of the usual teenage drama is stuffed in this film. There’s the love triangle, friendships being tested, and of course people sleeping with each other’s crushes. All of the above is, surprisingly, handled pretty well. Character motivations make sense, and it’s hard to point to one character as being in the wrong. Maybe it’s just the years of unrealistic teenage movies where every character fits into a trope and becomes a caricature of that trope, but the movie constantly surprised me in its handling of its characters.

One of the other things that surprised me about this movie was how well the technology was handled. The opening scene, shot from the perspective of a teenage girl’s Macbook, was slick and not as cringey as these things tend to be. Things like Tor, the dark web, botnets, and more were actually used realistically and not as magical ways to explain problems away. Even the game Nerve itself made sense as something that could exist in the real world. It reminded me a bit of Mr. Robot, a hacker show which also handles technology realistically. It makes me pretty glad to see more and more accurate representations of technology in media. Long gone are the days 1995’s Hackers and detectives yelling at computer screens to enhance JPEGS.

Overall, the movie reminds me of another Dave Franco movie, Now You See Me from 2013. It was a low budget movie that came out of nowhere and actually ended up surprising a lot of people. Just like that movie, Nerve isn’t perfect. The ending is rushed, and the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. But overall the flick is very entertaining, the cast is great, and it’s a fun watch for everyone.

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