Fingernails review: Jessie Buckley tears off her nail for love in this downbeat sci-fi romance

In the conceptual sci-fi romance Fingernails, a simple test is all it takes to confirm a couple’s romantic compatibility. “No more uncertainty, no more wondering, no more divorce,” reads a poster advertising the test, that plucks off a participant’s fingernail, zaps it in a computer and produces a positive or negative diagnosis. Jessie Buckley’s Anna may have received a positive result three years ago with her boyfriend Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White), but now something is nagging at her. She and Ryan are fine together: unexciting but largely content. That said, maybe she ought to sacrifice another fingernail and get clarification that they’re still really in love?

With its jokes expressed as deadpan as possible and its characters awash in spiritual melancholy, Fingernails makes for an easy companion piece to off-beat romances of the recent past: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Lobster are obvious influences. The latter feels particularly important, with director Christos Nikou starting off as a protégé of Lobster filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. But missing here is a sense of slight indifference to the logic-defying technology that drives the plot. Nikou devotes so much time to laying out the minutiae of the test’s rules that it becomes slightly distracting, only succeeding in opening up further questions. For instance, if a couple gets “50 per cent” on their love test – as opposed to zero or 100 – it means only one of them is actually in love, but the machine can’t identify who. The drama! But also… huh?

For Anna, her romantic insecurity is exacerbated by the arrival of Amir (Riz Ahmed), a colleague to whom she’s drawn and who doesn’t – yet, anyway – possess any of Ryan’s emotional withdrawal. Buckley and Ahmed have sweet, gentle chemistry; the film is at its best during scenes in which they semi-platonically orbit one another, despite the test insisting they’re both in love with other people.

Nikou is brilliant at tiny details – Anna and Amir attend a retrospective of romcoms starring Hugh Grant, with the marquee outside the cinema declaring that “no one understands love more” – and even better at inciting questions about how we love and stay in love today. Many of us are happy to leave app algorithms to dictate our relationships, why wouldn’t we lop off body parts if someone told us it would help our love lives?

As Fingernails goes on, though, it never transcends its leading questions. Instead it maintains a quiet simmer. Buckley gently sings along to lots of Eighties pop. Everyone wears lovely angora jumpers. The streets are always a little bit damp – like the cameras started rolling as soon as the rain stopped. I’d happily watch Buckley and Ahmed read the phone book; they both possess the kind of pensive eyes and ambiguous half-smiles that serve as catnip to funny-sad auteurs. But, like Anna, you can’t help but want a bit more eventually, too.

Dir: Christos Nikou. Starring: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, Annie Murphy. 15, 113 minutes

‘Fingernails’ is in select cinemas and streams globally on Apple TV+ from 3 November