Fingernails (2023)

Christos Nikou’s English-language debut has been on the wrong end of some fairly negative reviews since its release, which is a shame because there's rather a lot to like in it. Jessie Buckley (brilliant in everything) and Jeremy Allen White are Anna and Ryan, a couple who are 100% in love- and that's official, in a world in which a medical test has been devised to measure such a thing. Couples are invited to prove their love by undertaking a series of tests, culminating in the removal of one of their fingernails which are then placed in a machine to determine the percentage of their true love. A 0% score indicates neither party are truly in love, 50% means only one of them is, and-you guessed it- 100% is true happiness and love. Anna gets a job at the Love Institute, a place where the tests are administered to obliging couples where she begins working with Riz Ahmed's Amir; but strangely enough doesn't tell her boyfriend about her new placement. Fingernails feels like a low budget Sci-fi thriller without any effects, and while the idea at the crux of the film is ludicrous, it seems a lot less so when you stand back and think about the fact that in the near future, there's no doubt that someone is going to monetise an idea like this to willing fools. It brings up reasonably blatant themes of love and realistic expectations of relationships, and very much offers up the opinion of potentially having more than one soul mate. Critics have attacked the stupidity of the central idea but this does somewhat miss Nikou's point; he's well aware of the plot's shortcoming and argues it with his own film using some pretty effective black comedy. Nikou was formerly an assistant director to Yorgos Lanthimos, and that will come as no surprise to those who have seen Lanthimos' own English language debut, The Lobster (2015) with which Fingernails shares much DNA. And whilst Fingernails isn't a patch on Lanthimos' film- and one in which you can telegraph more or less everything that's going to happen from the outset- it's certainly not the clunker that some have claimed, and provides a rather amusing couple of hours. 7.1/10