‘Fingernails’ Is Yet Another Sappy, Watered-Down Sci-Fi Satire

It’s absurd to hope for certainty in matters of the heart, which famously wants what it wants, though that won’t stop us from trying. Such absurd hope is ripe for satire. It’s the subject, for instance, of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 art-house hit The Lobster, set in a speculative future in which people must partner up on the basis of a compatible trait—chronic nosebleeds, say, or nearsightedness. And now Christos Nikou, Lanthimos’s assistant director on breakthrough Dogtooth, has made Fingernails, set in a speculative future in which science has developed a foolproof test to confirm whether two partners are really in love.

The “Greek Weird Wave” spearheaded by Lanthimos relies on stilted, deadpan performances to draw out the inherent ridiculousness of our social conventions. The entire cast of The Lobster come off like aliens trying to blend in as humans by following a dog-eared, poorly translated rulebook. Fingernails seems, initially, to present as skewed a view of the romantic illusions, like the existence of soulmates to which we commit our lives. In the film, Jessie Buckley’s Anna takes a job at the Love Institute, a slightly oxymoronically named testing facility, half-dentist’s office and half-hotel conference center, which has developed the procedure couples now rely on to affirm their happiness. Love is an isolatable, binary, and static state; why listen to your heart, when you can simply yank out one of your fingernails with a pair of pliers, drop it and your lover’s fingernail into a machine that looks like a 30-year-old microwave, and wait for a readout to reveal whether you’re a 100-percent, 50-percent, or 0-percent love match?

Beyond this setup, there are at least a half-dozen moments in Fingernails that are as funny as anything in The Lobster—or they would be, were Anna’s own romantic indecision not played so frustratingly, bafflingly straight, with a prevalent wistful tone that suggests the film takes its own deliberately flimsy premise as seriously as its characters do.

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