Some personal news: there is a “life hack” circulating on social media about the dating app Hinge. If you are feeling uninspired by your current matches (has an “if” ever been more redundant?), you can ask to cancel your account. Hinge then offers you the opportunity to “refresh” your profile. Your pool of candidates will quadruple! You’ll find love! Three people from separate friendship groups have told me about this cheat code, and each time they explained the process, I thought, “Yes, this seems perfectly normal way to approach love.” Writing it out now in black-and-white sentences, it seems... hm, how does one put it? Absolutely bonkers. I do not think that dating apps have broken our brains, but they have certainly rewired our relationship with relationships. This turned out to be the right mindset to watch Fingernails, a thoughtful sci-fi film from director Christos Nikou, with a premise that would put these apps out of business.
In the near-future or a bizarro present, there is a scientific test that can validate a couple’s compatibility. 0% means you’re not a match, 50% means one of you loves the other, and 100%? It’s true love! The film’s title comes from the gory test: each half of the couple has to remove a fingernail as a biosample (not since Black Swan has a film made me so thankful for healthy nails). Anna (Jessie Buckley) and Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) took the test a few years ago and received a perfect score, which would be just peachy, if Anna were not feeling a little… lost. She takes a job at the Love Institute, run by Duncan (Luke Wilson, always nice to see), which organises the tests. It’s here that she meets and, in dating terms, “hits it off with” Amir (Riz Ahmed) who trains her: before the test, couples undergo a series of exercises that encourage co-harmony, like team-building sports or learning French love songs. Anna knows she has a match in Ryan and she is drawn to Amir and you can probably see where this is going.
In its pleasing weirdness, Fingernails skates along genres: romantic drama (Nikou was previously an assistant director for Richard Linklater on Before Midnight, and it shows), sci-fi (gorgeous set design from Kari Measham puts you in the mind of Severance) and out-and-out rom-coms (Anna and Ryan watch the bookshop speech from Notting Hill at a Hugh Grant festival: “No one understands love more,” the cinema’s marquee sagely proclaims). There are a few, to borrow another dating term, “red flags”. The test is fleshed out as lightly as those first date plans you have with that graphic designer whose picture you forgot you liked on the morning commute: how does any of this work? Are they just sticking those nails into what appears to be an oven and hoping for the best? How many people can you be compatible with? All that could be intentional – it reminds me of my nodding acceptance of Hinge hacks – but the characters’ blind faith is maddening.
If you can overlook that, and surely we have overlooked more dangerous warning signs when it comes to objects of our affection, there’s plenty to like in Nikou’s English language debut (his 2020 Greek language debut Apples, about a pandemic that causes amnesia, was well received). The chemistry between Ahmed (not doing an accent) and Buckley (trying on Canadian for size) is magnetic. As are the small observations: Amir watching Anna singing “Only You” at her desk. Or Anna, staring at a couple in a restaurant and asking, a little like a Linklater protagonist, “Do you think they’re lonely together?” And that premise is instantly compelling. What if science could tell you that the person you’ve picked is absolutely the right one? Would it bring peace of mind? Or boredom? And what would happen when life, as it has a habit of doing, gets in the way? Nikou draws out those complications in a mostly compelling manner. Sometimes, the actors’ charm papers over weaknesses.
After watching Fingernails, feeling despondent and experimental, I tried the Great Hinge Reset. Would I find love? My likes sure did pile up! But it was full of familiar faces I had already turned down, ghostly reminders of past lives. The ones who got away not getting away. I thought about a poster at the Love Institute (good signage in this film), which reads “Take the risk out of love.” In that world, eliminating uncertainty leads to exasperation and agony. But in this world, or at least my world, risk seems to have already vanished. What Fingernails suggests, with its familiar and far-off feel, is that if there’s nothing to lose, there’s not all that much to win either.
‘Fingernails’ is out 3 November on Apple TV+ and in select cinemas
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
