Fingernails
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White
Writers: Christos Nikou, Sam Steiner, Stavros Raptis
Director: Christos Nikou
Streaming on Apple TV+
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
A fable about an alternate 1980s world where a brutal form of technology can determine if two people are actually in love, Fingernails is a dystopian rom-com with a touch of wacked-out social satire and a pinch of sober cautionary drama.
That’s a tricky mix, but in a movie that trades on the intersecting uncertainties of technology, love, and social trends, the formula bubbles with energetic originality. For his first English-language film, Greek director and co-writer Christos Nikou goes to absurdist lengths examining the most basic of human quandaries: Is love really a thing?
Anna (Women Talking’s Jessie Buckley) works for a company that owns a technology that can scientifically determine if two people who think they are in love really are, or if they’re just kidding themselves. The process is quite simple, really: You and your supposed loved one just have to each allow a technician to yank out a fingernail and place them in a clunky microwave-like device. Thirty seconds later a computer screen offers one of three results: 1) You’re both 100 percent in love; 2) Neither of you is in love with the other; or 3) Only one of you is in love (maddeningly, there’s no telling which partner is the one feeling love).
For reasons not explained (and perhaps that’s for the best) the world at large has adopted this love compatibility test as a social necessity. At dinner parties, in restaurants, in public parks, couples all have the same question for each other: “Have you been tested?” Of course, no one’s forcing anyone to be screened for mutual love. But then again, the assumption is any pair who have not been issued a Certificate of Love by an authorized testing agency is just living in denial.
Anna and her partner, Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) are a couple who’ve seemingly got it all: They’re beautiful, they’re happy, and they’ve got their love certificate. Anna’s job at the compatibility institute involves putting couples who suspect they’re in love through rigorous love-enhancing exercises — a process that supposedly improves their chances of passing that nail-pulling screening test. The increasingly outrageous drills range from tandem skydiving to being blindfolded and told to sniff out their special someone in a room full of people who have not showered for three days.
Despite the rigorous screening process, as the company’s owner (a suitably clueless Luke Wilson) observes, barely 80 percent of couples prove to be a love match.
But is this quantified love a forever thing? That’s Anna’s question as, while still fond of her partner Ryan, she finds herself falling for her new co-worker, Amir (Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed).
Needless to say, it’s going to take a lot of fingernail pulling to sort this out.
Essential to the success of the film, Nikou’s cast plays the quirky premise perfectly straight. Buckley, with an adorable smile and earnest demeanor, pulls us willingly into Anna’s unlikely circumstances, making us truly care about the kind of happiness that lies in her future. In somewhat less rewarding roles, Allen and Ahmed wander helplessly in this Brave New World of romance.
Perhaps the true genius in Fingernails is Nikou’s choice to wrap his sci-fi premise in a pre-Internet past, bathing his scenes in an amber, almost nostalgic light. The resulting film plays as a futuristic memory, reminding us that no matter how advanced we may think we are, in a few years we will remember this as a Stone Age.
It’s clear that Nikou watched Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — another surreal tale of runaway technology messing with people’s minds — more than once. I wish that, rather than dwelling on his improbable invention, Nikou had come down more on Gondry’s winking acknowledgement that the film’s bells and whistles exist only in the service of making a larger point. There are whispers here of Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, and echoes of the COVID-19 testing era are, of course, inescapable.
There’s no question that technology dictates how we live our lives. As his characters scream through their fingernailectomies and sweat over their fateful readouts, Nikou’s question is, why do we let it?
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