Nerve

Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost built their 2016 film around an online dare game whose tasks are set by the people watching. The rating was a design decision: Schulman said the team wanted younger teenagers to get in, and a sex dare in the script was cut for being too dark. That ceiling shows at the end. In Jeanne Ryan’s novel the final round arms the contestants while wealthy patrons watch from behind a one way mirror, and the book closes with another dare landing on Vee’s phone. The film replaces that with a mass confession by the crowd, so the climax is settled by keystrokes rather than force. The pressure comes instead from a prize figure climbing inside the frame. The dares were staged in real New York locations between 13 April and 5 June 2015. Dave Franco on the blindfolded motorcycle ride: “Most of that scene we shot on a rig, but there’s a lot of shots there where Emma’s on the bike with the stunt driver.” The stunt driver wore the blindfold. A 19 million dollar budget returned 85 million worldwide. This lands for the viewer happy to have a thriller keep its prize total on screen and settle itself by typing. Not for a reader of the novel waiting on the armed final round it replaced.