TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2023 REVIEW! Fingernails is set in an alternate reality where, at the mere cost of having one of your fingernails ripped out, a machine can tell you whether you as a couple are right for each other.
This is facilitated by the Love Institute, where they also do a bizarre form of couples counseling, including having people stare at each other underwater. Jessie Buckley plays Anna, an elementary school teacher in a relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), and the two have been through the test and have the certificate to show they are a match. But things may not be as perfect as they seem when Anna secretly gets a job at the Love Institute without telling her partner. There, she trains under Duncan (Luke Wilson), who pairs her with Amir (Riz Ahmed). As Anna gets closer and closer to Amir, she starts to wonder if Ryan really is her one true love, no matter what the machine says.
“…the mere cost of having one of your fingernails ripped out, a machine can tell you whether you as a couple are right for each other.”
If you’ve seen the absurdist films of Yorgos Lanthimos, like The Lobster and Dogtooth, you have some kind of idea what you’re in for with Fingernails. The director of Fingernails, Christos Nikou, was an assistant director on Dogtooth. Fingernails derives plenty of humor from its absurd premise and situations, but it is a little more focused and slightly less zany than the films of Lanthimos. Yes, the setup is wacky, but it is real to the characters in it, and it treats them seriously. There’s a fine line between setting up your absurdist reality for laughs and having it be taken seriously enough to have an impact. Fingernails thread that needle perfectly.
In the film, nobody is forced to get their relationship certified, yet many couples opt to, whether to flaunt their perfection to their friends or to get some peace of mind that they are romantically on the right track. And yet odds of success are low — most find that they are a 0% match for each other, although some get a 50% match and even more rarely a 100% match. This immediately raises the question — why would anyone put themselves through this? Of course, it is really a commentary on our world where people “match” with algorithms on dating sites and get their relationships certified by the church. Why do we even have big ceremonies where we can prove to all our friends how much in love we are? This is where Fingernails completely resonated with me — I’ve never fully understood the degree to which weddings can drive some people to near insanity.
