Critic Reviews

Love is put to the test in Greek director Christos Nikou’s Fingernails, a sleek sci-fi film about a near-future where couples can scientifically test their love by removing one of the titular body parts.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

A love story hinging on human chemistry as a disruptive force would fall to pieces if its stars didn’t have that very unquantifiable quiver of static between them. But Buckley and Ahmed play off each other exquisitely, gradually reflecting each other in motion and mien, each looking at the other with the kind of facially centered full-body want that no amount of dialogue can convey on its own.

There will be blood, yes, but mainly there’s a well-written and beautifully performed investigation of yearning and the mysterious realm that apps and algorithms can only profess to quantify.

For some, Nikou’s deliberate intent to portray a subtly warped reality may read as forced. But there’s an endearing bizarreness to “Fingernails,” his first film in English, that allows him to grasp at some of the intricacies of the human condition, steeped in silences as much as heartfelt analysis.

Nikou’s film is brimming of humour and excellent ideas, but is mostly a rebuke to anyone who thinks algorithms and technology are the answer to human problems.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

Moving and convincing as a case for romantic anxiety being the most isolating thing in the world. Fingernails is funny until it’s not: deeply romantic from the top of your head to the end of your fingernails.

For all its whimsy, Fingernails is delicately profound. Its characters aren’t making bold romantic moves; they’re interrogating their assumptions of what is ultimately an unknowable phenomenon.

The quiet soulfulness of Buckley, Ahmed, and White makes for a banquet of slow cinema, one that haunts more than shocks in its parsing of love, lust, and longing.