During the 2020 Venice Film Festival, one movie made a particular impression on Cate Blanchett. The Oscar winner, serving as the Main Competition’s jury president that year, watched a witty and surrealist take on grief called Apples, from first-time Greek filmmaker Christos Nikou—and wanted in. “Exactly before the premiere of the film, I received the message, ‘Cate wants to have breakfast with you,’” Nikou recalls now, chuckling as if still in disbelief. She agreed to sign on to Apples as an executive producer and steer its release campaign, through her Dirty Films banner, and offered to make his next movie. Fortunately, he already had an idea.

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That’s the origin story of Fingernails, Nikou’s new film that has quite a pedigree. Blanchett produced it alongside her Dirty Films partners, husband Andrew Upton and Emmy nominee Coco Francini, as well as FilmNation Entertainment’s Lucas Wiesendanger. Its splashy fall release is being handled by Apple, with multiple high-profile festival stops slated over the next month. (The film will hit theaters and stream on Apple TV+ beginning November 3.) Then there’s the ensemble: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White—three of the most in-demand actors of their generation—occupy the lead roles, with the supporting cast featuring scene-stealers like Luke Wilson and Annie Murphy. None of this is typical for a rising European director making his first film in English. But crazy things can happen when you catch the eye of an industry icon.

Of course, it helped that Nikou came armed with a specific premise that drew an all-star team of collaborators. In the vein of Apples, Fingernails confronts big ideas and explores them, with an open heart and an off-kilter sense of humor, through a highly conceptual lens. This film imagines an alternate reality in which a machine has been designed to accurately determine whether a couple is in love—by studying the makeup of a subject’s fingernail, which has been willingly pried off. Counselors at the institute where the machine was developed work with couples in advance of the test, running exercises meant to bring them closer together and prepare them for a defining moment in their relationship. The goal is to get a “match.”

“Apples was a very personal story because I was talking about the loss of my father; this is also a personal story because it’s about how I’m trying to understand love,” Nikou tells me. He believes that Fingernails’ reach extends to “how difficult it is for people to fall in love right now—especially through the extensive use of social media and of all these apps.” The “machine” he’s created literalizes the function of all those algorithms and swipes and DMs that have saturated our everyday. “Love is the most elusive thing—it’s not something that you can put in your hand and analyze, it’s something that doesn’t exist in reality,” he says. “It is only in our heart or mind or soul.”

Don’t expect Fingernails to look like a Black Mirror installment, however. Taking inspiration from classics including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Truman Show, Nikou favors a spare, cinematic, character-driven brand of allegory. You will find no 21st-century technology in the movie at all, in fact, perhaps aside from the love machine itself (whose retro stylings indicate it may not be of our time, either). There are landlines instead of cell phones, which means no texting or app-ing. There are no laptops or smart TVs or Tesla-esque cars. You won’t even spot an email.

Nikou describes the setting as both “timeless” and “the ’90s,” which should make more sense once you see it for yourself. Look at the clothes. Listen to the soundtrack. It all feels out of time, if also particularly of that moment just before quotidian life so dramatically changed with tech. “Most of these conceptual [movies] are made in a very futuristic way,” Nikou says. “When we were discussing at the beginning with the producers, they were asking me why all these people are not holding cell phones. But there is also a way to make all these comments without showing anything.” He continues, speaking on his personal taste: “I am not a big fan of all these cell phones and seeing texts on the screen.”

The way we follow Buckley’s Anna, then, unfolds in the vein of a period piece. We meet her as she gets a job at the institute, working under a seemingly amiable boss (Wilson) and assigned to train with a relatively senior instructor named Amir (Ahmed). Anna is in a committed relationship with Ryan (White), and their love has been affirmed by the machine’s final judgment. They do not question its endurance between them. Yet it’s worn, familiar—quite the opposite of the spark that ignites between Anna and Amir. “We’re not trying to give answers about love, because we're not gods,” he says. “Love hurts—and even if it hurts, it’s so amazing to feel it.”

There’s that personal touch. “Christos is someone that questions human nature, questions why people are the way they are, why they feel the way they feel—but he’s not cynical,” says producer Francini. “He’s really warm. He’s playful and he’s ultimately a romantic.”

Nikou enlisted Emmy-winning cinematographer Marcell Rév, best known for his work on Sam Levinson’s The Idol and Euphoria, to set the visual template. They shot on film—again, deliberately working against those modern sci-fi trappings—and focused on photography that emphasized “empathy,” as Rév put it. “The big task here, visually, is to sell this world—and by that I mean you have to believe what’s going on,” Rév says. “We wanted to have something very realistic…. We have really vivid, very contemporary colors, but we still wanted to create something that has a sense of nostalgia, like you’re seeing something that’s in someone’s memory.” This is most evident in the way he captures the actors. Rév felt “surprised” by the way his approach was impacted by each of the lead performers, whose unique energies provide Fingernails with its texture.

Buckley imbues the story with a searching melancholy, Ahmed a steamy sense of mystery, and White a direct intensity. That mixture is most palpable as Buckley moves back and forth between the two men. “Riz will give you different things in every take, and then you have so many choices in the editing,” Nikou says. “Jeremy is the one-take actor. I mean, from the first take, you always have the best. You don’t need another one…. For me, he’s the new Ryan Gosling—that’s what I was telling him all the time.”

Some of the most visible indicators of your heart’s health can be found on your fingernails. That scientific fact, which Nikou and his cowriters, Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, discovered while researching possibilities for the movie’s love test, is given a romantic—and painful—application here. There’s no slick, digitized way of running diagnostics. It’s a quick procedure. The film’s characters simply sit in a chair, choose the nail they want pried off, and yelp in agony as their finger turns bare and bloody. Then they wait for a computer to tell them if they’re in love.

“We tried to make it look like an allegory, and not look like a horror film,” Nikou says with a smile. “I hope that it doesn’t look like a horror film.”

Fingernails appears to be the furthest thing from horror, though. Its understanding of the digital age’s impact on love and connection isn’t stern or nihilistic so much as it is curious, confused, and maybe a little heartbroken. The story locates joy and excitement in the spontaneous, the connections that eschew what any machine can tell you—and that are rarer than ever now. “When we did our second showing of it to friends, getting their reactions, I had everybody write their relationship status on a piece of paper,” Francini says. “I wonder how [Fingernails] feels for somebody that’s single versus somebody that’s married. I feel like the best films kind of hit you differently at the point of life you’re in.”

Fingernails’ world is not ours, but Nikou intends for it to feel like ours. It’s a movie that can be quiet and loud, weird and simple, sad and funny. The director tried to bring that energy to the production. He’d blast songs for the whole cast and crew while on set to prime them for a given scene’s mood, many of which made it onto the final soundtrack—Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” Cat Stevens’s “How Can I Tell You,” Haddaway’s “What Is Love.” Buckley would tell Nikou he looked like a three-year-old kid, with the director dancing around and singing beside his actors just before calling “action.”

For this director, it’s what seizing the moment looks like—not letting all the big names and bigger expectations make you take it too seriously. “For me, the most important thing was to find something that can be funny, that can be different,” he says, ”and that can be a little bit upsetting sometimes.”

Fingernails makes its international debut next month at the Toronto International Film Festival. Apple TV+ will release the film in select theaters and stream it beginning November 3. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.