NERVE Trailer

Riding into the summer movie season with some neon cool is Nerve, a thriller starring Emma Roberts and Dave Franco. The plot sounds like something out of a Dark Web horror story: an online site that pays players to take dares from watchers quickly escalates into a real-life game of survival for our two protagonists. It looks like things will get bloody and a bit romantic, with thematic ideas about how we interact online being tossed around.

It’s unclear how much these topics will be explored, but directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman have experience toying with this stuff. They broke out with the internet romance documentary Catfish, which certainly sparked some interesting conversations back in 2010. However, Nerve isn’t their own material; it’s based on a book of the same name by Jeanne Ryan and was adapted by Jessica Sharzer. Sharzer has actually written for Roberts before through the television series American Horror Story, which gives them experience not only with each other but also with heavily stylized genre material.

There’s accusations floating around that this film borrows from a Thai movie called 13: Game of Death. I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t speak to the veracity of that claim. However, the synopsis indicates that the prompts in that film come from a phone and not the internet. That feels like an important distinction to me, because the anonymity and group-think that goes down online is a weird and powerful modern phenomenon. Unfortunately, my name is posted at the bottom of this article, so I can’t get too crazy with my speculation about Nerve. I will say this, though: who the hell sits in a diner reading Virginia Woolf?

Nerve is directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It stars Emma Roberts and Dave Franco. It will be released in the U.S. on July 27th, 2016 and in the U.K. on August 12th, 2016. For international release dates, click here.

Are you going to watch Nerve? Let us know in the comments!