A tender love story is placed atop a contrived and quirkified sci-fi premise in this new movie from Greek director Christos Nikou, whose debut feature, the metaphysical mystery Apples, was much admired. However the speculative conceit of Fingernails makes the film play like an absurdist comedy from which the absurdist comedy has been edited out, to be replaced with a serious emotional yearning, which is always being deconstructed and ironised by its bizarre narrative context.
We find ourselves in a future world, or alternative present, or even an alternative recent past, judging from the roll-film cameras and landline phone use. Jessie Buckley gives an excellent performance as Hannah, a teacher in a committed if unexciting relationship with Ryan, played by Jeremy Allen White. This relationship has been certified by the Love Institute, headed up by rumpled, distracted scientist Duncan (Luke Wilson), which uses state-of-the-art analysis of bio samples to see if any couple is really in love.
But these samples are fingernails. Both partners have to submit to the agonising process of having a fingernail extracted and placed in a ridiculous microwave device. This may be a metaphor for the agony of thinking about love. Or it may have something to do with fingernail-malformation as a first sign of heart disease – an un-fun fact from the real world to which the film coyly alludes in the opening credits. Or it could just be part of the overall furniture of weirdness.
Hannah gets a job at the institute (without telling Ryan) and finds herself falling for Amir (Riz Ahmed), the sensitive new scientist there who has lots of novel ideas about coaching and refining love relationships, including experiments carried out on cinema audiences watching the “I’m just a girl” scene from Notting Hill. Inevitably, Hannah wonders if she shouldn’t test the reality of her feelings for Amir and his apparent feelings for her using the institute’s supposedly infallible techniques – in which we, the audience, have to believe (or suspend our disbelief) to invest in this love story. It is the intelligence and delicacy of the acting which keeps this wobbly contrivance steady.