Release Date – 3rd November 2023, Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 53 minutes, Director – Christos Nikou
Anna (Jessie Buckley) gets a job at an institute which can test the love between a couple, however despite a 100% result with her partner (Jeremy Allen White) the more time she spends at the centre the more conflicted she is with the result.
If you could prove the love in your relationship would you? This is the question that Fingernails follows on from as central character Anna (Jessie Buckley) gets a job at an institute which sets out to test the love between a couple. Couples go through various tests and processes – maintaining eye contact underwater, singing karaoke in French and finding each other only by smell – before a fingernail is taken from each, put into a machine and the result comes through. Either 0%, 50% or 100%, only one is ideal. Anna received a 100% result when testing with her long-term partner Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) a number of years before, however the more time she spends at her new job the more conflicted she becomes with the result.
This is the modern world and yet much of the technology on display, particularly the futuristic testing machine, seem plucked from the 70s or 80s. There’s an interest in the design and slight sci-fi elements which make up the film, however these are minimal and alone can’t lift the film up. Instead, we travel along familiar lines as Anna sees a potential relationship with co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed), going against her 100% result with Ryan. There might be some good gags here and there to help things along, but they don’t distract from a narrative that, despite the surroundings, feels stuck in convention.
Fingernails largely comes across as a film kept afloat by its surrounding elements. The always-reliable Buckley and Ahmed give, as expected, good performances, and there are, as mentioned, some very good jokes here and there – a highlight being couples having to sit through a Hugh Grant retrospective. However, little adds to the very base genre elements which have the potential to make for something more interesting and original. Instead, they simply act as a backing for convention. A narrative arc that we’ve seen done before, and better.
Add in the fact that the developments themselves are rather slow, with the film clocking in at almost two hours when it could be closer to 90 minutes or so. Director Christos Nikou’s screenplay, written with Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, goes back and forth on the psychological impacts the test has whether taken or not, however it skips between implications and focuses with little time to properly delve into certain aspects, with most helped by the central performances. It’s generally fine, but with the promise of interest and originality in place Fingernails is a familiar and therefore lacking piece of work with much of the lifting done by its non-narrative elements.
There’s potential for interest within Fingernails’ hints of sci-fi, however it falls into a conventional narrative with slow developments with the humour and performances being the core lift.
Just A Little Bit Random 