Fingernails, 2023.
Directed by Christos Nikou.
Starring Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, Annie Murphy, Avaah Blackwell, Juno Rinaldi, Delainie Marcia, Tanchay Redvers, Christian Meer, Katy Breier, Clare McConnell, Jim Watson, Varun Saranga, Albert Chung, Heather Dicke, Tameka Griffiths, Sienna Singh, Ashleigh Rains, Nina Kiri, and Iain Reid.
SYNOPSIS:
Anna and Ryan have found true love, and it’s proven by a controversial new technology. There’s just one problem, as Anna still isn’t sure. Then she takes a position at a love testing institute and meets Amir.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Fingernails wouldn’t exist.
Perhaps it feels unfair and silly to level criticism at a low-key sci-fi film for its basic premise coming across as hard to buy into, but that’s the issue with director Christos Nikou’s (co-writing alongside Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis) Fingernails feels off because the concept requires its characters to act so strange and adjacent from anything resembling actual human behavior that their actions and beliefs don’t always register as sensible. This is a movie where shock therapy is recommended to elicit an emotional response upon a partner leaving home for work or another reason, yielding unintentional hilarity when Jessie Buckley presses a button to do so.
A supposedly 100% reliable test has been concocted to gauge whether or not a couple is in love definitively. This process involves ripping out a fingernail from each participant and placing them inside a microwave-reminiscent device where an attached computer scans the fingernails and spits out numerical data. If the results come up as 50%, for example, it tends to mean that it’s a case of unrequited love.
Even meeting the film on its terms that this test is proven and bulletproof, it isn’t easy to accept a world where seemingly everyone takes these results as gospel. Upon learning that they are a match, couples are reassured that they will remain together forever and get married, whereas other couples are terrified to go through with the test, fearing that their relationship will never work out, no matter how much they currently claim to love each other, if the test comes back negative. In reality, there are a depressing amount of people who don’t believe in a virus that caused a pandemic and killed millions of people, yet they would believe in this romance test with such dry seriousness?
Setting aside the world-building barriers preventing me from fully getting involved in the premise, Fingernails centers on Jessie Buckley’s Anna, a woman who has matched with Jeremy Allen White’s Ryan but is starting to question that love, considering their relationship has become somewhat distant. Initially searching for a new job teaching elementary school, Anna decides to go behind Ryan’s back and take a job at the Romance Institute run by Luke Wilson’s Duncan, pairing her with Riz Ahmed’s Amir, overseeing exercises between patients looking to strengthen their bond before taking the test.
These scenes are by far the strongest in the film, both for the weird creativity behind the exercises (such as being blindfolded and forced to walk around the room locating your partner based on a specific fragrance they put on, or staring at one another underwater) and getting to know a young couple named Rob and Sally (played by Christian Meer and Amanda Arcuri), two people that we know are inevitably going to take this test even though they are clearly in love with one another and don’t need to. Their chemistry is so sound that dread starts to set in if this stupid test comes up negative and causes them to question their relationship.
However, the primary plot involves Anna slowly realizing that, despite Amir having a partner, she is falling for him. She has also become addicted to the results of this test, to the point where her character loses a comical amount of fingernails (it would make for a fun drinking game to take a shot every time she rips off one of her fingernails to place into the test machine) and is unsure what to do.
There also isn’t much tension or suspense because it’s made clear early on that the filmmakers are not on the side of this device and that no one should be. Love is an undefinable force, not something that can be calculated. It is something that is palpably felt and often unexplainable. There is no question what choice Anna should make, so it’s just a matter of waiting out the slow storytelling to see what happens.
Fingernails makes pointed and thoughtful observations on love, but the whole ordeal strains belief, even if the ensemble does a solid job trying to sell it. This is one way of saying my fingernail would come back at 50% affection on this film; there are some ingenious ideas stuck inside a rough script, struggling to make these characters come across as believable. They exist to serve the plot and the concept rather than themselves.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
