Shy and dreamy, Venus finds out through her fearless friend Sydney about Nerve: an online game that invites users to complete increasingly extreme challenges, which are streamed live on their phones, in order to win money. To prove to her friends that she is capable of taking on a dare, she signs up for the competition. It starts off with an innocent challenge, during which she meets Ian, another Nerve player. But soon it turns into an intense night with increasingly risky challenges, and finally into a nightmare watched by thousands of people ...

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Somewhere between thriller and teen movie, Battle Royale and Mean Girls, in the style of Project X and with the look of Spring Breakers, Nerve is like a potpourri of the new millennium. A superficial love story, with a simplistic and by-consensus moral, it is also hip, pop, politically incorrect and wannabe shocking when the main characters take on improbable challenges – walking around almost naked in a luxury boutique, getting tattoos, riding a motorcycle at high speed while blindfolded. Filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost already took on the dangers of technology in their 2010 documentary Catfish and now offer a glamour-and-neon version targeted at a specific audience. Even though the conclusion is anything but satisfactory, Nerve works: the adventure is captivating and sometimes surprising, filmed like a music video, and has Emma Roberts as the perfect teenager for the American mainstream.