Fingernails film review — Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed star in romcom with a sci-fi twist

Love isn’t dead — it just went to streaming. Amid the glitter mountain of romcoms on Netflix and Amazon, even finding one at the cinema feels like stepping back in time. When you do, it comes dipped in nostalgia itself. Earlier this year, bright-spark British romance Rye Lane featured a winking cameo from genre titan Colin Firth. Now, Apple’s mannered comedy Fingernails treats its characters to a Hugh Grant retrospective. “No one understands love more,” they are told.

Life was easier in Notting Hill. Here, star Jessie Buckley has a tougher route to happiness. She’s just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to help her remove a fingernail from a nervous client, to then be clinically analysed to determine whether the client and their partner are actually in love.

Such is the vaguely sci-fi heart of the film. The gruesome process is “the Test”, taken by couples across a generic North America, the movie set in a version of the recent past, or maybe a parallel future. Either way, love hurts, but not as much as the lack of it. The Test is a double agony for couples whose feelings are found to be medically unreal. 

Director Christos Nikou swerves between the melancholy and wilfully silly. The eyes of testers Anna (Buckley) and Amir (Riz Ahmed) meet over the pliers, despite her being in a proven pair with dullard Ryan (Jeremy Allen White). We see just enough testing to make us wince, but distraction comes with the knowing aesthetic: retro sad-sack offices, synth-pop on the soundtrack.

That isn’t all that conjures the past. You can imagine a Sleeper-era Woody Allen making hay with the premise of a love detector. Much of the running time is duly devoted to the zany means by which couples strengthen bonds: watching those Hugh Grant films, submitting to electric shocks when their partner leaves the room. (It heightens feelings of loss.)

Bits of this are likeably droll, though the sense of the second-hand extends beyond the early, funny Allen. Before his quirky 2020 debut Apples, Nikou assisted fellow Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos on his 2009 film, Dogtooth. Fingernails plays like the softer offspring of that movie and another Lanthimos unnerver, The Lobster.

But where those films teased and confronted, this one hovers awkwardly. Buckley is vivid; her co-stars miscast. Ahmed is charismatic, but standard nice guy is not his strong suit. White is still more bent out of shape, an in-demand actor (thanks to much-praised streaming series The Bear) from whom Fingernails drains all personality. (He does get to end a not-quite sex scene with the most brilliantly unerotic words in the English language: “I have a team meeting.”)

If the message is that we want to fall in love more than we ever really do, that sad little nugget is eventually replaced by a sweeter-toothed directive: follow your heart. (No coincidence that the film is set in a world without dating apps, for which the Test is a proxy.) But analogue passion needs a better advert than Anna and Amir. Their will-they-won’t-they might leave you shrugging. And wondering when Hollywood forgot how to make love stories big enough for movies.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas and on Apple TV+ from November 3