Suspenseful, captivating, romantic, and imaginative are just a handful of words to describe the movie Nerve. If you desire a movie where you will be on the edge of you seat, never knowing what is going to happen next, this is a movie for you. The leads, Emma Roberts and Dave Franco have great chemistry and keep the film going even at dull moments with their charm alone.

This is an adventure-thriller that revolves around an internet game called Nerve. Vee (Roberts) is a senior in high school who is shy and studious while her best friend Sydney (Emily Meade) is the big “risk-taker”. Vee is told by her group of friends that she can’t take risks, they get in a big fight and Vee goes home and signs up to play Nerve. In this game you are either a watcher or a player. A group of anonymous people online give over-the-top challenges, and the players that accept and succeed, win cash. Watchers, on the other hand, pay to see all of this go down on any cell phone in the general vicinity of where the dare takes place. The crazier the dare, the bigger the pay, and a bigger crowd online. At first everything is easy and the dares are simple like kissing a stranger or going to the city. As the pay gets higher, the dares get tougher and tougher like having to ride a motorcycle through a crowded street blindfolded at 60 mph. As Vee goes through these dares she meets a mysterious fellow player, Ian (Franco) and they are told by the watchers to team up for a series of dares across New York City. The camerawork following their adventure puts you right in the middle of the action. The camera is mostly hand-held and it is shot from their perspective. These parts of the movie had my palms sweating and feeling a rush as if I was a part of the movie.

At the end of the movie is where it falls down a bit and loses some of its quick and fast paced action. Nerve turns out to be the work of mischievous hackers, and while it is good that they kept hacking scenes to a minimum, it makes a bad choice doing the final dare as a battle in a filled colosseum-esque stadium. I think they should have done something that had to do more with the anonymous aspect of the game, like having to do the final dare somewhere empty or the same scene, but with no audience in the stadium. Still, Franco and Roberts keep the audience on their toes with their charming ways.

I think being able to tie in aspects of social media and the dangers of it into a movie was a great choice for targeting teenagers of our generation and making them really love it. Students at YLHS who have seen this movie have seemed to have really enjoyed it. Arezu Monshizadeh (10) said,”It was a great movie that I highly recommend  to anyone!” Shelby Emami (12) went deeper and really analyzed the movie by saying,”I thought it was good! I really liked the movie as a whole because it kept you at the edge of you seat with all of the anticipation and different dares the characters did. In a sense it kind of portrayed society today and how the Internet really influences teens and the decisions they make on the internet to appeal to different people.” Nerve was overall an amazing movie with fantastic actors, an interesting theme, great chemistry between characters and it did a great job of keeping you caught up in it. I do not tend to like a movie this much, but I would give it a 10/10 and definitely it recommend to anyone.