Two young women sit in a movie theater, sharing tissues as the blue light bouncing off the projector screen shines on their tear-stricken faces. The image is quickly interrupted when the scene jumps to moments later, after the film. The women are in the same seats, but this time donning annoyed scowls as they listen to a cliché, self-important male director participating in the film’s post-screening Q&A. “I did this personality test online and it said that I’m in the top percent of risk-takers,” he boasts with an air of performative listlessness. “Do you feel like as a filmmaker that has to do with your skate background?” the moderator asks, leaning forward in her chair. Of course he’s a skater. “I knew you were going to ask me that,” he responds. The young women recoil at the expressions of this archetypal film bro douche-bag, but suddenly, something shifts–at least for one of them. The camera moves in on his face, inspired as he says: “You can’t accept something that hasn’t been paid for. If you’re a true artist, make the voyage, move the inch, set yourself free.” She finds prophecy in idiocracy–she decides that in order to be successful filmmakers, the two women must break up with their boyfriends.

The concept of feeling as though one must lose something to gain something was fascinating to director Eve Liu and had been tailing her thoughts for quite some time before making her film Nervous Energy. “I feel like when you're young and you've found your vocation, there's a sense of ‘I have to be extreme about it. I have to make a sacrifice.’ It’s the age-old ‘everything worth having requires great sacrifices,’” she said. “I think it's sort of like proving to yourself that this thing you’ve dreamed up is for real. It’s about committing.” 

Through twelve minutes of creative jump cuts, melodramatic camera zooms, hyperbolic dialogue and deranged montages, Nervous Energy puts different ideas of sacrifice to the test and, in Liu’s own frenzied way, explores the delicate balance of delusion and pragmatism necessary to reach happiness and fulfillment. 

Nervous Energy was developed during Liu’s time attending New York University’s Graduate Film program. She spent her formative years moving around the globe with her parents to places like Minnesota, Australia and the United Kingdom, giving her a confusing accent and a cosmopolitan mindset. Liu knew what the rest of the world could offer her, but she wanted to make a capital “N” capital “Y” New York movie while she was living there and immersed in such a unique and bustling place. Inspired by its swarms of people and “anything can happen” promise, the movie manifested in an ode to the fast-paced ambition of the city–its glories and its undoings. 

Liu would admit she has romanticized the concept of making great sacrifices for art in the past, to the point where she would fantasize about giving things up for the sake of moving the needle on just something, anything. This feeling is personified in Nervous Energy’s young heroine, Jay, as she proclaims to her friend Kiki that they must end their respective relationships. Liu said that for her, it is less about the thing that she sacrifices than it is about the act of sacrificing itself. To Jay, it is a ritualistic slaughtering for the gods in the hope that they will notice and give something in return. 

Throughout history, mankind has performed sacrifice as a purifying process to remove the taint of evil and assure a desired outcome. Jay’s concept of sacrifice is akin to this biblical type–one of blood or animals or neighbors–that follows a sort of immediate “if-then” structure. If the community sacrifices, so the thinking goes, then the gods will reward them with rain for the crops. If you break up with your boyfriend, then you will be rewarded with a successful career. This form of sacrifice comes from feeling a lack of control over a situation. Grasping, the subject looks to find something that they can quickly do in order to have power over their life again, even if that power is illusory. “What are you going to do, raise three million dollars to make a feature film tomorrow? Art happens over a span of years,” said Liu rhetorically. “The only thing you can do immediately is break up with your boyfriend.” What are the village people going to do, trek to the river and bring back water bucket by bucket over the span of weeks to bring bounty to their crops? Something they can do immediately: decapitate someone in a temple. 

These types of religious sacrifices were typically thought of and completed by groups of men, which lends them a masculine nature. Liu believes the nature of these historical rituals is paralleled in modern situations as well, expressing: “It feels quite masculine to give something up for art. I guess a lot of this film was me being nervous that I am not doing enough. I feel so tethered to these boys and girls in my life. Maybe I should be brutal, maybe I should give them up.” 

Speedwalking through Times Square, Jay explains to Kiki why they need to release their tethers and break up with their respective boyfriends in order to earn the reward of becoming great filmmakers. “Have you ever met a successful male artist who sacrificed their cool life for a cool girl?” she asks, then tells an anecdote about a woman who received a Fulbright scholarship to study Buddhist manuscripts in Cambodia and gave it up after getting hitched and pregnant.