Two Great Actors Can’t Make Fingernails’ Romance Believable

Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed are hard to buy as thwarted lovers, though that’s mostly the fault of the film’s half-baked premise. Photo: Apple

As someone who’s always worried about getting incepted with the opinions of others, I try to avoid looking at reactions to a film before writing my own. But after seeing Fingernails, I was hopelessly curious about what other people thought about the pairing of Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, who play Anna and Amir, co-workers who are also, in their own low-key way, thwarted lovers. Fingernails is about chemistry, in both the figurative and literal sense — it’s a romance that takes place in a world where people can get their feelings tested at an institute that provides scientific confirmation of love (or a lack thereof). For its characters, connection has become a clear-cut matter of yes, no, or the dreaded 50-50 (where one party feels one way and the other does not). For the rest of us, chemistry remains intangible and mysterious, and it was interesting to discover that viewers seemed split between believing that Buckley and Ahmed had it in spades or didn’t have it at all. Whether the movie works depends on whether you buy the pair as willing to defy reason to be together, despite Anna already being partnered up with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), a boyfriend with whom she tested positive. And I just didn’t believe it, because Buckley and Ahmed, two dynamic performers, kept gliding smoothly past one other instead of giving off any sense of being irresistibly drawn together.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center. In order to get tested, participants have to surrender one of their nails, which gets pulled out sans anesthetic with pliers. Clients at the Love Institute, where Anna takes a job, leave with a finger swaddled in a telltale bandage that informs the world that they’ve submitted themselves to this gory process. The test itself involves a retro tech machine that looks like an old-fashioned microwave, fitting in with the film’s generally muted, autumnal aesthetic, and no one doubts the accuracy of the results or whether they’re being subjected to what amounts to a cruel psych experiment. Anna’s been assured she’s in love with Ryan and is loved in return, though she’s dissatisfied and stifled by a relationship with someone who treats love as something that, once achieved, doesn’t need to be thought about anymore. (One of Fingernails’ funniest achievements is casting White as a boring dud right as his small-screen work has rocketed him into peak sex-symbol status.) “Sometimes being in love is lonelier than being alone,� Anna sighs.

The Athens-born Nikou is a Yorgos Lanthimos protégé and makes work that is just close enough to his more famous countryman to doom him to constant comparisons. There’s undeniably a Lanthimos-like quality to the central conceit of Fingernails. In addition to the tests, the institution, which is run by an unflappable Luke Wilson, also runs exercises to boost the romantic potential in couples by having them sing in French, that most amorous of languages, or watch Hugh Grant movies, or find each other, blindfolded, by scent. It all brings to mind the far more involved hotel for singletons facing a deadline to pair up in The Lobster, a film that concludes with its own potential act of self-mutilation. But Nikou doesn’t go in for anything like Lanthimos’s near-extraterrestrial absurdism — his characters are grounded, and recognizable, and living in something much more like our reality, which makes their approach to romance come across as jarringly childlike. It’s not just that they’re stunted by technology that assures them that love is binary. It’s that nothing seems to exist outside the quest for a very traditional (though not necessarily hetero) idea of coupling up. An acknowledgment of, say, lust, a quality Fingernails is devoid of, would make it feel less twee.

Buckley does her best to treat the film’s half-formed premise with seriousness — her Anna is wistful and genuinely conflicted about what to do, even if the idea of being bored in a settled relationship doesn’t seem like that revolutionary a dilemma. But neither she nor Ahmed, whose Amir is an instructor Anna ends up paired with, come across as believably anxious to be together in defiance of what the tests say. Fingernails is happy to subject its characters to pain but curiously reluctant to acknowledge that attraction exists, as an element to romance but also as a fact of life. It may be a story about the unknowability of love, but its pulse never races — it doesn’t pick up at all.