REVIEW: ‘Fingernails’ and the quandaries of love and romance

The movie starts great. A warm, cozy color palette, competent performances, a fascinating and weird premise. But, then, you gradually lose interest.

At one point, the protagonist, Anna (Jesse Buckley), and her boyfriend Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), are watching a science documentary about gravity, described as a force that no one really understands.

Gravity is clearly an analogy for the movie’s theme, which is love. Love, as the movie implies, is a force we experience but never really understand.

Why do we fall in love with a certain person, even when we’re already in a relationship? Why do we settle for a relationship that does not make us happy? Why do we find ourselves in love with two people? Is it attraction or love? Are we just bored? Are we just in love with the idea of love? What is true love? Does true love transcend definitions?

Greek director Christos Nikou of the acclaimed dramedy Apples (2020) looks into the quandaries of love and romance through his 2023 romantic sci-fi fantasy, Fingernails. The film premiered in last year’s Telluride Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival of the same year.

Often, we fantasize about getting a crystal clear answer: Is this person truly in love with me? Fingernails gives us the opportunity to live this fantasy in the Greek filmmaker’s absurdist drama set at a period in time where the Internet does not exist.

In the film’s unspecified time, couples get tested if they are in love with each other for real by having their fingernails pulled out without anesthesia. Yes, the procedure is literal torture. But isn’t being lovesick torture as well? Isn’t the agony of not knowing where you stand in a romantic relationship or a situationship (unspoken or spoken) torture as well?

Couples in this story can also choose to go through exercises together to deepen their connection (because, love is also hard work) before taking the fingernail test.

Buckley’s Anna (Nikou seems to love this name, as the woman in Apples is also named Anna) is in a routine-kind of relationship with White’s Ryan. Interestingly, Anna lies about many things to Ryan. One day, she develops a crush on her co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed) and eventually falls in love with him.

With the story’s premise, it is difficult to come up with a concrete ending. Sure, we appreciate open-ended questions in films. But the ending feels like a cheat, leaving you emotionally shortchanged.

The ending asks the questions: Do we really need machines and tests? Is the Love Institute that does the fingernail-testing a scam?

Sure, we can be compatible with someone but not have chemistry with them. Is this what defines Anna and Ryan’s relationship?

What we can only derive from the film are observable facts: romantic feelings are powerful, with physical symptoms. But love is a thousand spectrum, and, like gravity, as the film says, it remains to be a mystery. The film, however, chooses a cop-out ending.

Ahmed and Buckley have palpable, sizzling chemistry, and Buckley is so good at looking smitten. Too bad, the story becomes dragging in the middle until it fizzles toward the anticlimactic ending. It’s like quickly falling madly in love at the beginning, only to fall out of love just as quickly.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Stream on AppleTV+