The trailer for the Emma Roberts and Dave Franco starring film Nerve — based on Jeanne Ryan’s YA novel of the same name — has just been released, and if you can differentiate it from whatever else is already on your computer screen, it may warm your viral content-consuming heart and then make you uneasy about that fact — or at least that’s what it looks it’ll try quite hard to do.
Co-directed by Paranormal Activity 4′s Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the Internet-drenched trailer about two people who appear to fall for each other while playing a truth or dare app, looks like it tonally follows the revelations in the film. The trailer begins by teasing a hyper-modern rom-com seeing the protagonists through their viral meet cute into their early adventures and inevitable burgeoning romance, then transitions into a thriller when they find out the people behind the aforementioned app have stolen their identity, and then becomes full-on dystopian fantasy (or is it dystopian reality?!?!?!) when they realize they’re actually playing “to survive.” As Vulture points out, in the vein of some memorably, er, Famished Activities, everyone is watching and loving their struggle.
Emma Roberts plays a high schooler (whose mother is Juliette Lewis!) who’s coaxed by her friends into playing the titular app; “this looks very sketchy, is this legal?” she asks, with heavy-handed foreboding. And as she goes about using the app with the “sizzling hot” Ian (Franco), the stranger she’s been paired with, they start to see that the dares within the app are getting more and more dangerous. (The biggest danger seeming to be letting Josh Ostrovsky aka “The Fat Jew” give you a tattoo.) Eventually, they realize they’ve “become prisoners of the game.”
Watch the trailer:
The film hits theaters July 27.