In the age of Ice Bucket Challenges and Doofl (a “dare to do more for charity” app), Nerve takes world of viral-friendly truth-or-dare challenges to the next level. The first trailer, featuring Emma Roberts and Dave Franco, has arrived and showcases the dark side of the Internet. Well, not Unfriended dark, but dark nonetheless.
Roberts plays Vee, a high school senior who hasn’t been “living life,” so she does what anyone who’s having a late-teen life crisis might do: participate in a series of intense competition of dares for the watchers on the Web. While it starts out all fun and games — and she even becomes mildly Internet famous through her partnership with Franco’s character — she soon becomes the victim of identity theft by the game-makers, who remind me a lot of the same figures in The Hunger Games.
Watch the trailer below:
Nerve is actually based on a novel by Jeanne Ryan, and the Amazon description even begins with “For fans of The Hunger Games,” so you know it’s chasing down that Millennial audience. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who co-directed Paranormal Activity 4 and Catfish, re-team to helm this film adaptation, which also features Juliette Lewis.
When it comes to films that take advantage of Web-friendly mediums like this, it’s easy to scoff at. But then I think of something like Unfriended, which seemed like it would turn out horrendous and actually ended up scaring the crap out of me. Here’s hoping we all will have the nerve to watch Nerve.
The film hits theaters on July 27. Here’s the official plot synopsis:
Industrious high school senior, Vee Delmonico [Emma Roberts], has had it with living life on the sidelines. When pressured by friends to join the popular online game Nerve, Vee decides to sign up for just one dare in what seems like harmless fun. But as she finds herself caught up in the thrill of the adrenaline-fueled competition partnered with a mysterious stranger [Dave Franco], the game begins to take a sinister turn with increasingly dangerous acts, leading her into a high stakes finale that will determine her entire future.
