There is a pin-sharp and provocative premise nestled within Christos Nikou’s science fiction romance Fingernails, but it can’t quite save this unusual and occasionally smart love story from feeling weirdly conventional, despite a pair of engaging turns from Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed. The set-up of Nikou’s second feature (and English-language debut) is an initially promising and lightly dystopian treat.
The setting is an alternative reality which is modelled to look and and feel close enough to be our own. The development of a revolutionary test that can determine whether a couple are a perfect match has sparked a love crisis after an 87% failure rate. The test itself is deliciously wince-inducing, involving each person donating one of their fingernails to be tested in a technologically primitive-looking machine which, befitting the retro-futurist tone, looks more like an oversized microwave oven. The dismal success rate of this experimental procedure has resulted in the creation of love institutes, where romantic couples are put through a series of oddball exercises to test their compatibility before they take the test.
The fingernail extraction suggests that we may be descending into body horror terrain, but there is very little bodily gruesomeness in Fingernails. Similar to Nikou’s previous film, the low-budget amnesiac comedy Apples (2020), the tone is sweet rather than sour. It’s been three years since happily coupled Anna (Buckley) and Ryan (an underused Jeremy Allen White) received a positive test result and, like most couples, have now settled into a routine of dull domesticity. Ryan thinks re-testing is unnecessary, but recently unemployed schoolteacher Anna starts to find her feelings shifting and takes up a secret job working at one of the love institutes, where she is drawn into the orbit of the lab technician Amir (Ahmed). The pair are required to facilitate induction interviews and the pretest exercise, and it’s these stretches where the film is at its most dryly humorous, almost resembling an oddball workplace comedy. The exercises become increasingly bizarre and far-fetched, including blindfolding the couples and asking them to locate their partners with only their sense of smell or a botched attempt to stage a fire in a fake cinema to see how the couples respond to one another in a moment of extreme danger. These scenes are both silly and charming.
The film is full of lovely incidental visual details that at times recall the visual style of a Charlie Kaufman film in its combination of drab reality with surrealism and deadpan humour. When Anna arrives at the institute, we are told that the sound of trickling rain is pumped around the building because the sound makes people feel more romantic, and later we catch a glimpse of a restaurant sign that says happy hour for couples in love, and a very funny sight gag at the expense of Hugh Grant. Luke Wilson also gives a droll supporting turn as the founder of the institute. As Anna and Amir predictably find themselves getting closer together, the validity of the tests and the institute begins to come into question, but it is at this point that the film’s sharper, satirical instinct gets sidetracked for a far more winsome and traditional romance where characters speak in generic aphorisms (“Sometimes being in love is lonelier than being alone”). Buckley and Ahmed are charming individual performers, but their romantic chemistry rarely rises above a lukewarm simmer.
As an examination on modern coupling and a sly riff on our current obsession with data collection, algorithms and endlessly swiping left and right on dating apps, Fingernails is only partially successful. It doesn’t quite sustain the off kilter energy of its premise as it begins to sputter out into predictable territory. The concept of love is shown to be a painful entity, both literally and emotionally, as the characters slowly realise that this should be based on instinct and not something to be dictated by a computer — if only it was able to retain the dry charm of its early scenes. Unfortunately, Fingernails needed sharper talons to match its imaginative instincts.
