Fingernails (now streaming on Apple TV+) is the American debut from Greek director Christos Nikou, who landed two of the day’s top-shelf actors, Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, to headline this offbeat, sometimes disarmingly weird sci-fi dramedy. Nikou is a former Yorgos Lanthimos understudy (he was an assistant director on Dogtooth) who may have been inspired by Lanthimos’ The Lobster, which took an oddly funny, dystopian-authoritarian angle on love and courtship all the way to becoming a cult hit. Fingernails is decidedly gentler, especially considering its doozy of a central metaphor, which finds couples determining whether their love is true by having their fingernails ripped out. Keen! But whether the metaphor is functional or not is the question.
The Gist: Fingernails is one of those movies that’s set in a slightly alternate, slightly sci-fi reality that teases out details in little observational tidbits: Is it me, or are the characters driving older-model cars? Are there cell phones? Nope – just big clunky plastic telephone-type phones attached to cords, which means it rings and you have to hustle to the other room to answer it. In fact, there’s nothing resembling a personal computer here at all. This is an analog existence, it seems. But there are widescreen TVs, although they’re all of a reasonable size. And everyone listens exclusively to vinyl, so if this is the future, it looks like the hipsters won. Do with all this what you will, but the main thing is, in this world is a world-changing organization called the Love Institute, which scientimifically tests couples to determine if they’re really, truly in love with each other. (Was this premise previously explored in a sitcom called The Love-Matic Grandpa, or am I just nuts? I’m probably just nuts.)
Anyway, some people “believe in” the Love Institute’s work, and some don’t. Anna (Buckley) and her long-term boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) do, possibly because they’re in the minority of testees: Their love was affirmed by the procedure, the crux of which involves each getting a fingernail ripped off, after which they’re placed together into a microwave-like machine, which whirrs and beeps for a bit then spits out whether they get a 100 percent score (both in love), a 50 (only one in love) or a zero (sad trombone). How exactly this was developed is a mystery – I know, it has something to do with using scientimifical measurements, but the details are left to the imagination. We first meet Anna as she interviews for a job as an elementary-school teacher, but what she really wants to do is work for the Love Institute. She’s a romantic pollyanna type personality who’d probably be a lot less interesting if Jessie Buckley wasn’t playing her, and she really truly believes in the Institute, which is enough to convince its founder, a bland gent of gentle demeanor named Duncan (Luke Wilson), to hire her.
She’ll learn the ropes under Amir (Ahmed), who oversees the implementation of bonding exercises designed to strengthen couples before they do the decisive – and bloody and painful – fingernail extraction, and therefore increase their chances of scoring 100 percent. Notably, those exercises weren’t in use when Ryan and Anna took the fingernail test but, hey, they’re totally great together in their boring rut, watching documentaries about elk on TV. The bonding exercises range from staring at each other underwater for 60 seconds, singing karaoke songs in the language of love (that would be French, of course) and seeing romantic films, including, but not limited to, in one of the film’s few comedy bits that actually land, a Hugh Grant retrospective, which includes, but is not limited to, Notting Hill, the use of which makes us feel ever so slightly better about this weird reality.
Anna and Amir work together all day, and where he’s a more buttoned-up personality, she gets attached to couples, and actively roots for them to succeed in the love tests. Thing is, Anna and Amir work so closely, she begins to like the cut of his jib. At a work party, she catches him dancing like nobody’s looking, except she’s looking, and rather intently, it seems. What if they, you know, are in, like, you know? Is it possible to love two people at the same time? Should they do the fingernail-yank thing to find out? Might it just be easier (and less bloody and painful) if they talked about it? Maybe, but remember, indeed, this is a disturbing universe.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Fingernails cribs from The Lobster, Michel Gondry’s odd-duck experiments (especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and those This Reality Is Just A Little Bit Off movies like Never Let Me Go and Sorry to Bother You (although it’s not Way Off like mother! or Beau is Afraid).
Performance Worth Watching: Buckley proves she’s worth watching in anything, even a muddled lark like this. She underscores her character with complexity and life where there isn’t much in the script, although there are times when she just looks silly, and you yearn for her to land another powerhouse role like in Wild Rose or The Lost Daughter.
Memorable Dialogue: A Love Institute trainee asks a legit question (even if it’s the wrong question) regarding the fingernail test:
Trainee: What do we do if someone doesn’t have arms?
Duncan: To be honest, I have no idea.
Sex and Skin: Naught but a postcoital cuddle.
Our Take: Fingernails is a rather large conceptual horse pill to swallow. It often feels profoundly dumb, with a muted, it’s-the-dryyyyyyyy-cracker approach to inspiring laughs – so dry, the comedy is essentially a non-starter, causing the whole machine to sputter and fail because it’s impossible to take any of this seriously. Example: One of the bonding rituals involves undressing a number of unshowered individuals and seeing if a blindfolded person can find their partner using only their sense of smell. It’s an inarguably silly scene, with the sniffing and the nose-scrunching and the people in their underwear, but its failure to provoke a laugh pushes it into weirdness-for-weirdness’-sake territory, an approach that functions better when a movie’s subtext is more than just the quiet assertion that any attempt to objectively quantify love is a fool’s errand.
Nikou and co-scripters Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis’ use of irony sometimes works; nothing throws a loose nut in the machine like two people falling in love while working together to foster love in others. Meanwhile, a lovers-bonding moment between Anne and Ryan derails when they attend a pottery class together and he complains about his hands getting too sticky (which makes you wonder if the Love Institute ever programs Ghost for its clients). The film can be thoughtful when its reasonably compelling ideas don’t get in their own way, or when it’s not inspiring Ahmed – so great in Sound of Metal – to give a near-anonymous performance.
But all this doesn’t quite mesh with the gross fingernail sequences, of which there are far too many – be prepared to squeam – or compensate for the concept, which is so rickety, it makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look like a slick Lambo. I mean, can people fall out of love in this reality? What is the vague “crisis overreaction thing” that’s a part of the recent history of this reality? Would a toenail work for an armless person? And doesn’t getting a fingernail ripped out really really really f—ing hurt, enough to deter reasonable people from undergoing this rigamarole? Is this reality full of unreasonable people? What the film ultimately lands on is Buckley delivering a truism: “Sometimes being in love is more lonely than being alone,” which is the kind of pithy quasi-profound greeting-card drivel-nonsense that makes you feel like Fingernails just wasted your time.
Our Call: Fingernails squanders its talented cast on a premise that just doesn’t work. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.