DIRECTED BY

Christos Nikou

STARRING

Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, Clare McConnell, Jim Watson, Christian Meer, Amanda Arcuri, Heather Dicke and Albert Chung

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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.

Fingernails is a sci-fi romance directed by Christos Nikou, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis. Set in the not-to-distant future (or alternate universe), love has been quantified to a fine science, as controversial new technology at the Love Institute can take bio samples from a couple (with the sample in question being their fingernails), and test them in a microwave-like device to test whether or not they are both completely in love, one of them are in love, or neither of them are in love. Anna, a woman trying to get a job teaching at an elementary school, has done the test with her boyfriend Ryan before and is in a committed relationship with him. Anna ends up getting a job at the Love Institute and shadows fellow colleague Amir, showing her the exercises that they run to test the bonds of the couples that wish to take the love test, while seemingly falling for him in the process.

In terms of its concept, Fingernails is certainly intriguing. If love has been quantified down to a computer algorithm and ‘basic’ science, once you know learn that you truly are in love and your other half feels the same way, do you accept that result moving forward? Or if you might question the ‘routine’ or ‘sameness’ of the relationship down the line, just you just go ‘well we are a certificate telling us we’re in love, so we must stick it out’? This is the questions raised during the course of the film, none moreso than when we’re following Anna. Her and her boyfriend Ryan took the test a few years ago and we found to be both in love and while Ryan seems content with the ‘routine’ of their relationship, Anna can’t help but feel that there’s something missing in their relationship. She initially lies to Ryan when she accepts the job to work at the Love Institute, and while we question why she would do such a thing, we see later throughout the course of the film how she tries to get Ryan to do these classes or exercises that they do at the love institute, with mixed results.

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As always, Jessie Buckley is a fascinating actress to watch (having first seen her in Beast), not just with how she delivers her lines, but also in how she conveys emotion. Riz Ahmed, as always, is just as fascinating an actor to watch with how he portrays the character of Amir, particularly when he tries to sound out his thoughts to Anna, but either he prevents himself from doing so or someone interrupts them. The will they/won’t they office romance between Anna and Amir in particular is engaging to watch at first, with their quick glances at each other when the other is not looking, the words that go unspoken, and their chemistry onscreen is arguably the highlight of the film. However, in terms of the script, it didn’t engage me as much as I thought it would. There’s a quirkiness to the concept and there is a few lines of deadpan comedy here and there, but it’s an overtly serious film that yet doesn’t dive further in the concept of how the love test algorithm was conceived. It also really doesn’t raise as much of an issue on how mankind seemingly accepts this algorithm as gospel, until of course the final act but by then it still feels slightly underdeveloped. I wonder though how much Yazoo got for the use of ‘Don’t Go’ and especially ‘Only You’, with the latter featuring heavily during the course of the films runtime.

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VERDICT

Fingernails is an interesting concept that gets by with the power of its cast and their performances, rather than the script.

★★★