It’s absurd to hope for certainty in matters of the heart, which famously wants what it wants, though that won’t stop us from trying. Such absurd hope is ripe for satire. It’s the subject, for instance, of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 art-house hit The Lobster, set in a speculative future in which people must partner up on the basis of a compatible trait—chronic nosebleeds, say, or nearsightedness. And now Christos Nikou, Lanthimos’s assistant director on breakthrough Dogtooth, has made Fingernails, set in a speculative future in which science has developed a foolproof test to confirm whether two partners are really in love.
The “Greek Weird Wave” spearheaded by Lanthimos relies on stilted, deadpan performances to draw out the inherent ridiculousness of our social conventions. The entire cast of The Lobster come off like aliens trying to blend in as humans by following a dog-eared, poorly translated rulebook. Fingernails seems, initially, to present as skewed a view of the romantic illusions, like the existence of soulmates to which we commit our lives. In the film, Jessie Buckley’s Anna takes a job at the Love Institute, a slightly oxymoronically named testing facility, half-dentist’s office and half-hotel conference center, which has developed the procedure couples now rely on to affirm their happiness. Love is an isolatable, binary, and static state; why listen to your heart, when you can simply yank out one of your fingernails with a pair of pliers, drop it and your lover’s fingernail into a machine that looks like a 30-year-old microwave, and wait for a readout to reveal whether you’re a 100-percent, 50-percent, or 0-percent love match?
Beyond this setup, there are at least a half-dozen moments in Fingernails that are as funny as anything in The Lobster—or they would be, were Anna’s own romantic indecision not played so frustratingly, bafflingly straight, with a prevalent wistful tone that suggests the film takes its own deliberately flimsy premise as seriously as its characters do.
Anna and Ryan (The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White) have been together for three and a half years. They’ve taken the test and passed, which means that their routine, with lots of either comfortable or complacent cuddling on the couch watching nature documentaries, is ratified as the real thing. (There’s a certificate and everything). But everybody’s got a hungry heart, and so restless Anna starts working alongside Amir (Riz Ahmed) at the Love Institute, which in addition to running the tests operates a sort of cram school, where couples train for their test through pair-bonding exercises like trust falls and Pavlovian electric shocks when the other one leaves the room. (Lanthimos’ characters, too, willingly submit to outrageous pain.)
To a certain extent, this is just a reductio ad absurdum of the wellness industry, a couples’ retreat where there really will be a test after. There’s no coercive power, state or otherwise, behind Fingernails’ soft dystopia, just apparently widespread acquiescence to a new lifestyle product. But this heightening of our own reality isn’t matched with a commensurate hyperreality in the filmmaking. There’s a particularly Lanthimosian moment when the future test subjects strip down to their underwear and a blindfolded boyfriend is directed to identify his girlfriend by scent. But rather than stay at a clinical distance, Nikou’s intimate, moving camera finds itself caught up in the touching uncertainty of the couples worried about whether they’ll pass and stay together. Anna is particularly fond of one couple, a college-aged boy and girl whose first-blush protectiveness toward each other probably reminds her of her early, euphoric days with Ryan.
Ahmed is believable as the kind of coworker you develop a crush on: slightly awkward and prickly, but wonky and passionate about the job—a man you wish you knew better. Anna begins to question whether her socially sanctioned relationship is the real story of her life, and it’s not long before she’s absentmindedly singing Yazoo’s “Only You” to herself at her desk, feeling the melancholy ambivalence of encroaching midlife, the anxiety of irreversible choices, like Past Lives if its stakes were transparently made up.
Fingernails’s anonymous Toronto locations and heterogenous cast (Buckley does an American accent; Ahmed doesn’t) are familiar from so many festival-indie slot fillers. But rather than exploit his movie’s ersatz sheen, Nikou leans into the mopiest clichés of the genre: the burnished lighting, the cheesy but sneakily sincere needle-drops, the deep muted New Yorker-story sadness in the way that Anna and Ryan drift apart. (It’s nobody’s fault). Buckley, who sinks deep into her characters, is affecting as someone weighing a stable but sparkless long-term relationship against the excitement of someone new, but the movie does her no favors by forcing her to wrestle with a metaphorical conceit grafted over this dilemma for no real reason. Her character is fully realized and relatable, except for her idiotic belief in a concept operating on a different plane of reality than the rest of the movie.
On the one hand, it feels unfair to discuss Fingernails so persistently in relation to The Lobster. On the other hand, it’s a comparison that Fingernails begs, on its hands and knees, as it crawls along in the footsteps of a movie, made by a mentor of its director, that’s already executed its exact premise to a decade-defining standard. When Anna catches sight of Amir dancing on his own at a party, frugging in a private ecstasy, it’s hard not to think of the similar robotic performance interludes in Lanthimos films, which in addition to being darkly funny reveal the wrenching vulnerability of characters otherwise at the mercy of a cruel and capricious world.
Nikou never goes against the grain to find pathos—he sands down his satire until there’s nothing but tenderness. The Lobster was one of A24’s name-making films. This watered-down, risk-averse knockoff, which is going to Apple TV+ a week after its theatrical release, eventually seems like the Tarantino imitations clogging the shelves of video stores in the mid-to-late 1990s: a Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead for Letterboxd power users.
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