Every critic comes across a movie that they absolutely love. They then go to see what other people have said about it…and find out that they might be the only critic to love it. And then you go to see audience scores (critics can get it wrong, you know) and see that audiences seemed to dislike it even more. And you wonder what you did wrong. Then you remember that film criticism is generally subjective so you are allowed to like what you like and champion those movies that you’re convinced should be treasured.
Fingernails is that film for me this year. This dry-as-the-desert lo-fi sci-fi romantic dramedy, the first English-language feature from Greek writer/director Christos Nikou, made me fall in love with its dryly (did I mention its dry?) sweet clever take on the intersection of love and technology. This high-concept film asks, “What would it mean for love—or the lack of love—to be confirmed by science?” It turns out that it’s kind of messy and soulless. Which is what you should expect when we submit the idea of love to something it has no business being subjected to.
Anna (Women Talking’s Jessie Buckley) takes a job at the Love Institute, one of the companies that offers a test that can confirm whether two people are in love. Each partner pulls off a fingernail (love hurts, right?). The nails of each couple are put into the computer (it’s basically a microwave with a television monitor) which then tells the couple whether they are 100% in love, 0% in love, or 50% in love (i.e., one member is in love and the other isn’t). Because so many couples were splitting up when the test was first developed, business like the Love Institute were started to help couples learn to build their relationships before taking the tests to have a better chance of finding the one. Anna, a teacher, has come aboard to help guide such couples through the process in hopes of helping everyone find true love.
Anna’s love of love, however, is tested in her own relationship. She is in a relationship with Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White). Their love for each other has been confirmed by the test. But their relationship looks, well, boring. Having had their relationship confirmed by science, Ryan doesn’t seem to have much motivation to work at the relationship, content to spend his time with Anna sitting on the couch watching nature documentaries. But Anna wants more; she doesn’t simply want to have a scientifically confirmed love, she wants to really experience that love. She uses the skills she’s teaching others to try to strengthen her connection with Ryan. At the same time, as she is being mentored by another counselor at the Institute, Amir (Sound of Metal’s Riz Ahmed), she starts to experience feelings for him. He, unlike Ryan, also believes in love that feels like love. But the test has already given the stamp of approval of her love for Ryan. Can the machine be wrong? Can a person be “in love” with two people. And, in a world where love is confirmed by science, what does “love” even mean?
The biggest draw of Fingernails for me is the way that it wrestles with that question. Much like fellow countryman Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (the two worked together on past films), Fingernails exists in a world where people have seem to forgotten how to be in love. By ceding matters of the heart to the cold mechanizations of science, people no longer attempt to understand their emotions or the nature of the give-and-take of a loving commitment, but simply rely on science to tell them if they’re in love. That allows for relationships like Anna’s and Ryan’s, that don’t look a lot like love, and for aspiring relationships that simply quit because the machine tells them “no.” Nikou and company are essentially indicting our desire for the (alleged) certainty of science in matters that science has no business speaking to. Love is the realm of the heart, the mind, the emotions. Love can be “proven” by how we see two people relate, interact, and sacrifice for each other. But to seek scientific certainty takes out so much of the joy, the mystery, and the real chemistry out of love as we are meant to experience it.
The movie works in large part because of its cool and extremely talented cast. The nature of Christos’s work is to keep characters very constrained, making them do a lot of work internally. And they all do wonderfully. Ahmed brilliantly mixes together his belief in true love and his championing of it with a grudging acceptance that it’s pretty rare and a wistfulness that he can’t seem to find it even when he’s sure he has. White gets the most thankless job. He and Buckley don’t have much chemistry…which is the point. He has to be content with his relationship in a kind of bored way. It’s like he’s been in a marriage for 35 years even though Ryan and Anna are still young and should be vibrant.
The movie, however, primarily belongs to Buckley. She’s become kind of a new queen of indie quirk (see, for example, I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Men), and her performance here is right in that lane. She expertly bundles her hope in true love, desire for something more, and confusion as to why it all doesn’t seem to look or feel right. She also has my single favorite moment of physical comedy all year when she undertakes a pretty drastic measure to add a little spark to her feelings for Ryan. It’s a truly great performance which remains sadly underseen.
The other compelling feature of Fingernails is its look and design. As with his first feature, Apples (which I even more strongly recommend), Nikou intentionally creates a retro low-tech world in which to place his hi-tech concept of love confirmed by science. He has commented that society has let tech take too much of a role in the pursuit of love. He even chose the fingernail as the body part to be removed for the test as a comment on our cell-phone swiping, making the removal of the thing that protects the finger that swipes symbolic of the lack of guardedness that truly love desires. Thus, we get a future-based story in a world with land lines and computes that would look more at home in the 1970s. But it’s not the 70s, confirmed by such things as 80s love songs by karaoke (in French, the most romantic language) and Hugh Grant film festivals. Because where else do you learn about love than from Hugh Grant film.
Fingernails is a small film asking big questions. It is willing to challenge our assumptions about the good of technological advance into area that simply aren’t suited for it and about what love really looks like. It’s quirky, sad, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking and heart-affirming all at the same time. I absolutely loved this movie. Ans I don’t need any test to confirm it.
Fingernails is streaming on Apple TV+.
(Photo credit: Apple TV+)