Fingernails
A contemplation of love in a parallel world that reflects our own is way too bonkers to connect on an emotional level.
Love machine: Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed
In spite of its title, Fingernails is actually a love story. At least, it’s a film about love. Set in an indeterminate place and time (there are no mobile phones or flatscreen TVs), it feels like an Orwellian romance with a strong whiff of Charlie Kaufman. Which could be a good thing. Anna (Jessie Buckley) is a teacher who secures a job at The Love Institute, an organisation that monitors and calibrates the relationships of couples. Its director, Duncan (Luke Wilson), explains that his aim is to take the risk out of love, to appease any feelings of uncertainty and to ward off the possibility of divorce. Society is fracturing and in the middle of it is a giant hole where love used to be. So, once couples have undergone the programme at the institute, they are ready to take the test, the love test. It is said – according to a caption at the beginning of the film – that the earliest signs of heart problems are often found in the spotting, bending or discoloration of fingernails. So it is Anna’s job, along with her colleague Amir (Riz Ahmed), to test each lover’s fingernail by extracting it and then submitting it to radiation analysis.
At the start of the film, Anna is seen with her partner Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) having dinner with friends and discussing whether or not any of them should take the test. One couple, who hooked up just three months ago, explain that they don’t believe in it. Immediately, there is a sense that there are the followers of the status quo and there are the antivaxxers. Is this a parable? A retro-dystopian romance? It may come as no surprise that Christos Nikou, the director of this completely bonkers film, worked with Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth (2009). His sophomore effort is a contemplation of love in the modern age, when couples need some kind of machine-led confirmation of their commitment. But considering the current breakdown of monogamy and the introduction of a brave new world of sexual possibility, Fingernails feels quaint and outmoded.
Christos Nikou stresses that fingers still lead the charge in romance, whether they’re swiping through a dating app or gripping a mobile phone in tender absentia. A wedding band has now become the reassuring ringtone of a lover’s call. All this is very well, but the narrative trajectory of his film is slow and also predictable and this world is so weird that it’s hard to identify with its protagonist, Anna, who sports a brutally unprepossessing hair cut and lies to her husband. She and Amir attend a Hugh Grant retrospective, although he confesses a preference for horror. So the film does have humour, even if it is devoid of wit. Charlie Kaufman would have made this fool’s paradise hilarious (on a good day). As it is, one clings to the strangeness of it all by, er, one’s fingernails.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Annie Murphy, Luke Wilson, Christian Meer, Amanda Arcuri, Katy Breier, Clare McConnell, Nina Kiri, Jim Watson, Varun Saranga, Albert Chung, Heather Dicke, Juno Rinaldi.
Dir Christos Nikou, Pro Coco Francini, Andrew Upton, Cate Blanchett, Lucas Wiesendanger and Christos Nikou, Screenplay Christos Nikou, Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, Ph Marcell Rév, Pro Des Zazu Myers, Ed Yorgos Zafeiris, Music Christopher Stracey, Costumes Bina Daigeler.
Apple Original Films/FilmNation Entertainment/Dirty Films-Altitude Film Distribution/AppleTV+.
112 mins. USA/UK. 2023. UK and US Rel: 3 November 2023. Cert. 15.
