FINGERNAILS - Mark Reviews Movies

Fingernails, Apple Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Here's a story that revolves around a gimmick that doesn't make much sense, isn't developed in any meaningful way, and doesn't seem to really matter in the context of whatever point the movie is trying to make. Fingernails is set in some near future or alternate present or maybe even an alternative past, where people can determine if they really, truly love a romantic partner. There's a test for it, but it requires a single fingernail, ripped out in its entirety, as a sample.

The screenplay—written by Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, as well as director Christos Nikou—attempts to make some sort of sense of this procedure. Some posters around the testing facility point out that heart conditions can be detected by way of abnormalities in the fingernails, and if one somehow buys that love literally exists in the organ of the human heart, maybe it'll be easier to accept such throwaway pieces of explanation.

There are more significant questions, of course, such as whether this test only detects romantic love, which seems to be the case, and what the nature of that kind of love actually is in the filmmakers' minds. Some of what we see here suggests infatuation or a serious crush might test positive as love, but maybe it's the concept of a soulmate that the test discovers. That can't be right, either, because couples who have tested positively as a perfect match can later have a negative outcome. Yes, people can fall out of love, to be sure, although, again, whatever the movie believes that to mean in general or within the context of its story remains unclear.

The whole movie just accepts this as a simple fact, because the screenwriters think they've hit something with their gimmick, and hope we'll buy into the conceit, simply because they think it's clever. It's really not, in part because the idea is so thin but mostly on account of how little thought the writers have put into the notion, as well as how to generate drama out of it.

The plot has Anna (Jessie Buckley) taking a new job at the testing facility, which also serves as a training center for couples who want to have the best chance at obtaining a positive result. That, perhaps, throws the concept of soulmates out the window, because this whole arrangement suggests that people can learn to genuinely love another person. Has anyone in this world thought to put that to any kind of experimentation by taking groups of strangers, assigning them to perform this coursework in pairs, and determining if it's just the exercises or something deeper that achieves a positive result for love?

Are these the sort of questions the filmmakers want to leave so open to uncertainty? When the premise depends on an audience having a clear idea of its central gimmick for world and the characters and the stakes to function, they should probably give us just a bit more than little details of art direction and generalities.

The main story becomes a bit of a love triangle, in that Anna is in a long-term relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), with whom she tested as a love match years ago, but starts to feel something for her new co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed). Those two relationships get the bare minimum of development. Anna and Ryan have hit a level of comfort, while she and Amir catch or miss longing stares in each other's direction as they have couple perform those romance exercises. If not for Buckley's ability to convey so much in a single look, there would likely be nothing with which to connect here, save for the broad, vague melodrama of a woman having feelings for two men.

What's most frustrating about this—beyond how the fingernail-pulling concept is so inconsequential that it's almost as if the filmmakers know how transparently cheap it is as something to occasionally shock—is that the story eventually arrives at a few intriguing ideas. What does it mean for a couple to have a fifty-fifty result, meaning only one partner genuinely loves the other, especially when the identity of the in-love person isn't revealed by the test? Can real love, proven by some scientific process, be as rewarding or stimulating as the excitement and fear of doubt?

Just when Fingernails starts to reveal some genuine stakes and actual conflict and pertinent questions within its narrative, the movie deflects from and bypasses them, until it's simply too late to explore the potential drama and what it might mean for these characters, as well as more generally. It ends, not with any sort of examination of or revelation about love, but with a meager shrug of wasted possibilities.

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