Writers: Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner
Director: Christos Nikou
Is love a biological function or an emotional response, can humans control who they fall in love with or are they DNA-destined to match with particular people? Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner’s domestic dystopia imagines a society in which love matches are awarded certification based on a laboratory fingernail test. Screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023 Fingernails is a wry and smartly satirical love story that probes at different types of gentle social control facilitated by technology that create divisions within society.
A perfect match in the fingernail test, Anna and partner Ryan are comfortable in their relationship but Anna is interested in attending local classes at a research institute to increase their intimacy. When Ryan refuses to consider it, Anna gets a job as a trainee instructor working with the charismatic Amir who she begins to think might be better suited to her, but do their fingernails agree?
In many ways, this is a classic dystopian story, taking rules established by others that don’t quite fit a film’s protagonist – in this case an attraction to someone else – and pushing against the validity of the idea. Fingernails has a classic assimilated beginning in which Anna advocates for the very rules she later tries to break, a middle when she slowly comes to question the scenario and an ending in which the rebellion and its outcomes become known. And while it could dig quite a bit deeper into that notion of social control, the ordinariness of the world Nikou creates is a really interesting feature.
Almost everything else about this scenario is entirely recognisable, small-scale and told from the point of view of a handful of characters led by Anna and focused on her romantic dilemma. This is recognisably a twenty-first century world which brings familiarity and relatability for the viewer, and it’s interesting that really only one tiny shift in perspective, the genetic love matching, alters the tone of the film ever so slightly. Small touches such as kit that looks like it is from the 60s and a strange pastel aesthetic in the institute play with the timelines nicely, adding perspective to the visuals.
Jessie Buckley’s Anna is an everywoman discovering there might be more to her life than she imagined. The feelings of seemingly unrequired love soon grow into a quiet sense of disbelief, initially, at the shape of her life as a result of this new knowledge but, later, she comes to believe that perhaps the science is wrong. And Buckley brings the audience into her emotional trajectory entirely although an extreme ending may not be the greatest basis for a relationship. Riz Ahmed is a charmingly understated colleague who has mysterious of his own including an inability to reconcile his own feelings, while Jeremy Allen White is a deliberately bland presence as Ryan but in the context for some of the film’s later revelations suggest his comfort is not unreasonable.
Despite some graphic scenes involving pliers and a stick to bite down on which will make you shudder even though you don’t see it in its gory glory, Fingernails is often very funny and quite sharp in its analysis of imposed expectations about love and how couples should behave when they have seemingly found the one.
Fingernails is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
