‘Nerve’ Trailer: Dave Franco and Emma Roberts Teach Us the Dangers of the Internet

Judging by a trailer that seemingly reveals just about everything (including the bodies of its leads), Nerve takes the premise of indie thrillers like Cheap Thrills and the lesser-seen 13 Sins and re-frames it with the treacherous world of a little place called The Internet. With that particular distinction in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you that Nerve was helmed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, the directing duo behind Catfish (the movie, not the TV show).

Schulman and Joost also directed the best Paranormal Activity sequel (the third), but then again, they directed arguably the worst (the fourth) — which makes Nerve a real toss-up, and the trailer above adds a mark to the negative column, since it feels like we’ve already watched the entire film. All that’s left to discover is whether Emma Roberts and Dave Franco shoot each other at the end of it.

At the center of Nerve is an online game (also called Nerve), in which a group of “players” must submit to the whims of the “watchers” to win cash. The amount of money offered increases as the dares escalate, but if a player bows out before the game is over, they lose everything they’ve accumulated so far:

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.

Yes, it sounds a lot like Cheap Thrills, the cringe-inducing dark comedy about a couple of broke friends who agree to a wealthy couple’s increasingly horrendous dares in exchange for increasing sums of money. Or, to take another approach, this looks like a remake of David Fincher’s The Game for the internet generation. It wouldn’t be surprising if the whole “game” turned out to be a mass hoax.

Dare you to find out for yourself on July 27.