Wednesday 8 November 2017

Nerve (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2016)

What starts out as a run-of-the-mill American high school film with its jocks and bitches wanders off course as the lead character, an insecure (but of course still pretty) girl gets sucked into a game played on the phone that involves increasingly large prizes for increasingly dubious and dangerous dares, which unsurprisingly then seriously cross the line. Made by the duo behind 2010's cautionary documentary about Facebook, Catfish, this time their target is social media as a bullying force, a breeding ground for a kind of faceless fascism, as the game's participants are goaded on by a horde of followers everywhere they go. There is a valid point to it in that aspect, for teens at least. The rest of the plot, however, is purely and unambitiously lifted off The Hunger Games.

5/10

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