Fingernails review: Jessie Buckley is charming in this tender sci-fi love story

If you could take a test to find out the exact, scientific percentage of love shared between you and your partner, would you do it? What if all your friends and family had done it, and some of them were buckling under the pressure of realising their devotion wasn’t at 100 per cent, while others were smugly celebrating the total certainty of their lives together?

This is the premise of low-key sci-fi romance Fingernails. In a world very much like our own, Anna (Jessie Buckley, understated and charming) and her long-term live-in boyfriend Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) have passed a “love test” with flying colours. The test itself involves the painful extraction of a single entire fingernail from each party. These are then entered into a machine to determine their love levels.

The test has grown so popular that couples are undergoing training to improve their connections and more effectively pass it. The love test institute facilitates everything from blindfolded “scent” games (could you smell your partner’s neck and know it was them vs somebody else?) to Hugh Grant film marathons.

Anna takes a job working at the institute, and her colleague Amir (Riz Ahmed) becomes her mentor. Inexplicably, she doesn’t tell Ryan where her new career is based, and slowly, the unspoken dissatisfaction in her workaday, uninspiring relationship seems to mount ever higher. But why, when they still have so much mutual respect and affection?

As Anna and Amir work chastely together on new ideas for love tests, a tension between them develops. In one scene at a work party, it is so stark that both their respective partners fall awkwardly silent: although there’s humour here, it is often laced with discomfort. A “what if” starts to hang over their heads, begging the question: can you be 100 per cent in love with two people at once? And could technology ever really determine a love match to last forever?

Filmed with a gentleness and a sly, melancholy wit, Fingernails is a quiet and philosophical love story, undermining modern romance culture and all its algorithms and dating apps. The combination of tenderness and tech calls to mind the worlds of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or The Truman Show; director Christos Nikou has spoken before about their influence on him.

In a world increasingly affected by AI and tech-related alienation, it’s wise to examine how risky it is to entrust one’s future to the algorithm. Fingernails shows the risks of flattening out the messiness and idiosyncrasy that allow us to fall in love – or to accept that love may wax and wane over the years without any dramatic rupture, as evidenced by Anna and Ryan. It asks that we don’t outsource our decisions or emotions to tech, but to look inward and embrace the complicated things which make us human.