When a film featuring this excellent cast with a fairly promising premise turns out to be this dull, it's a big let down. Fingernails, which tries to comment on our perceptions about love, feels truly unromantic and I'm not sure its "insights" into the issue it tackles do much more than... wait for it... scratch the surface.
This high concept romance is set it a world where couples can be trained to love and submit to a biological test (that involves ripping out their fingernails) to confirm whether or not they have "real love" or not. People then make their life decisions about their partnerships based on the results of these tests. Clearly it is trying to say something about love and its nature but it never quite delivers on this promise.
Buckley and Ahmed are both strong (as they pretty much always are) but the film doesn't really build any chemistry between them or make you believe they are in love. And this, being central to the premise of the film, makes it feels like the story falls apart. The film spends a lot of time trying to make you feel she has little to no connection with White's character, to the point where they hit you over the head with it. Yet they can't seem to convince us of her feelings for Ahmed no matter how many "meet cute" moments the film tries to squeeze in.
And in the end the film's main message seems to feel a little... obvious... I appreciated at least Fingernails doesn't attempt to offer any easy answers or end with a big romantic gesture moment. The film's main problem is its a slog. Maybe it's lack of revelatory meaning wouldn't matter if it was more enjoyable. But it's slow and dry making it a bit frustrating that its message is so rote.
Fingernails
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, Annie Murphy
Director: Christos Nikou
Writers: Sam Steiner, Stavros Raptis, Christos Nikou
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