Romance and love are two topics that have been tackled in Hollywood for decades. More often than not they are handled in a straightforward way. As with The Lobster, the Yorgos Lanthimos film from a few years back, Fingernails tackles this topic in an odd if not off-the-wall sort of way. This film is going to be for some people but it wasn’t for me.

In the near-distant future in a big city, Anna (Jesse Buckley) and Ryan (Jeremy Allen White) are a happily married couple. It has been proven by a technology that this society uses. She is looking for a job as a teacher and has some good possibilities when she comes across and applies for a job at the Love Institute. The very same one that proved her and her husband’s love. The problem is once she starts to work with the various couples she notices she isn’t as happy in her marriage as she thought she was. Add the fact she has an attraction to her co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed)

Christopher Nikou wrote, with the help of a few others, and directed this film. I’m sure he had the best intentions with creating this story. The problem is love doesn’t work the way he portrays it in this film. It’s much more complex and nuanced than this. Sure they use tests and activities to show compatibility between couples but the end factor of cutting off fingernails and putting them into a machine to get the final reading of if couples are meant to be together or not is a bit far-fetched to me.

The director assembled a very good cast of actors and actresses for this film. Buckley, Ahmed, and White have all garnered a lot of Awards buzz for various other projects like Women Talking, The Sound of Metal, and The Bear. They are all very capable actors. They even make this material, which is quite frankly crazy, very believable.  They are just cast in a bad movie with a bad premise. Luke Wilson is also in this film as the head of the Love Institute and he’s playing it straight. You can tell he knows this is a bit ridiculous what they’re saying and pretending to believe.

Nikou, a Greek filmmaker, has worked with Ahmed on another of his films, Apples, about finding new identities. He has a penchant for writing weird stories and Turning them into films. This is another such story. He wants the audience to believe love is found in a laboratory and it’s not. All the tests and activities in the world can’t prove whether people love each other or not. I prefer the old-fashioned way of finding a lover. You just go out in the world to school or work or to a nighttime hangout and meet people and maybe you’ll find the right one for you. It’s that simple. It’s not a scientific experiment. 

Fingernails has an interesting premise that fails once you start looking at what it’s really trying to say. The performances of Buckley, White, Ahmed, and Wilson are good and they do the best they can to sell this idea to the viewers watching this film. Love and romance aren’t something that can be manufactured in a laboratory or with some fancy techniques or technology.  It’s a natural occurrence between people who find interest in each other through work, school, sports,or hobbies they have in common. This film fails the true meaning of love and romance.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen