VOD film review: Fingernails
Review Overview
Cast
8Concept
8Conclusions
6David Farnor | On 12, Nov 2023
Director: Christos Nikou
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson
Certificate: 15
“We’re all achingly lonely,” observes Duncan (Luke Wilson) early on in Fingernails. The fact that he’s in charge of the Love Institute, which exists to help couples pass a scientific test that measures whether they’re a compatible match, gives you an indication of what to expect from Christos Nikou’s follow-up to Apples.
Jessie Buckley stars as Anna, a teacher who has been with her partner, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), for years. They took the test a while ago, confirming that they’re a good match. “Even if sometimes our relationship settles into routine, we don’t need to question that,” he observes to friends – but with confidence and comfort can come complacency, and that begins to eat away at Anna. Ryan, of course, is blithely unaware of what she’s going through.
Anna gets a job at the Love Institute, where she is partnered with Amir (Riz Ahmed), whose job is to take couples through the training – and devises the exercises to help them strengthen their connection. These scenarios, which include staring at each other underwater and watching Notting Hill in a cinema, are where the film is at its best, drawing out the absurdity of this semi-dystopian future. Understated and deadpan, they also tap into the film’s central concerns of how futile it is to try and measure and quantify something that is, by its very nature, uncertain, unquantifiable and unscientific.
The script, by Nikou, Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, keeps things wonderfully understated throughout, even as it skewers tropes and cliches, such as rain making people feel romantic and French being a more erotic language than English. That gives it a more natural, grounded feel than, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but means it struggles to find its way to something distinctive from Amazon’s similarly wired TV series Soulmates.
The cast, however, are electric both together and apart. Jeremy Allen White brings a hangdog poignancy to his longterm boyfriend, ensuring that Ryan doesn’t become a villain – he’s never cold, but rather a warm partner who’s just going off the boil. Riz Ahmed, meanwhile, gives Amir more depth than simply a potential love interest – the chemistry between him and Jessie Buckley is exciting in its tentative intimacy, but there’s complexity to his own happy love life that pointedly highlights how we look at each other’s lives, as well as how we inspect our own.
Buckley, meanwhile, is impeccable as ever. She effortlessly takes us with Anna as she navigates thoughts of commitment, estrangement and compatability with a heartfelt honesty – and a growing realisation that the only certainty in love is that it comes with a risk of pain and requires total vulnerability. If the film never quite gets to a satisfying conclusion in answering its myriad thought-provoking questions, that feels all too fitting. This is a moving, engaging and tender piece.