Rating: 3 out of 5.

Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)

If a scientific test could prove whether you and your partner are truly in love with each other, would you take it? Even hypothetically, it sounds slightly bizarre, doesn’t it? To imagine a machine could prove something so subjective… However, the 2023 sci-fi romance/satire “Fingernail” is based on this very fictional premise, where protagonists live in a world where a controversial new technology claims to give couples a sure-shot result on whether they are in love with each other. Both subjects must be willing to part with a fingernail for the test, which is then placed in a machine that can only yield three possible results – a 100% match would mean the couple is in love, a 50% match means only one of them is in love but it can’t specify who, and then there’s a 0% match which means neither of them shares a strong romantic bond.

Directed by Christos Nikou, who has co-written the script with Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, “Fingernails” follows Anna (Jessie Buckley), who gets a job at a ‘Love Institute’ and begins to question her feelings for co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed), despite being in a committed relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), with whom she has a 100% match. But all didn’t seem hunky dory with the pair even before she met her new distraction.

This is the kind of farcical satire that would’ve been a lot more entertaining to read than to watch it unfold at a snail’s pace on your screen. With an almost two-hour long runtime, “Fingernails” unravels too slowly, with its far-fetched premise gnawing at the practical parts of the viewer’s mind. However, Jessie Buckley as the hopeless romantic Anna, trapped in a routine relationship with Ryan keeps this flimsy film alive. Anna is a passive hopeless romantic who puts too much faith in love-tests and does little to fix whatever problems she has with her partner. Jessie Buckley vividly portrays Anna’s claustrophobic feelings, her loneliness, and the second-hand joy she derives from watching young couples do exercises at the love institute to help increase their bond.

Riz Ahmed as Amir doesn’t seem to believe in romance at all, and something just feels off about him throughout the runtime, like he is up to no good and that there would be some sinister twist by the end of the movie about his motives. That wasn’t really the case. Jeremy Allen White is wasted in his small supporting role as Ryan, who claims he is madly in love with Anna, but is ridiculously oblivious to the obvious signs – that Anna is growing distant.

“Sometimes being in love is lonelier than being alone, you know?” Anna says in a climactic scene, and that’s what “Fingernails” does manage to capture best—the sense of isolation that might come from being in a romantic relationship where one partner starts to feel invisible and perhaps parts with too much of their individual self to accommodate the other. It’s a sluggish film, with a lot of scenes that are either deliberately or unwittingly annoying. However, the climax neatly concludes Anna’s tale with a rebelliously positive twist—the kind of ending you genuinely hope for after enduring all the nonsensical “love exercises” and “love tests” throughout the film.

Rating: 6 on 10. You can stream “Fingernails” on Apple TV.

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