Fingernails Review: Chemistry Abound, But the Story is Lacking

What if you knew that you and your partner are in love courtesy of a test wherein the truth lies in your fingernail? That’s the premise of Fingernails, Apple TV+’s latest acquisition.

While I wanted to love it, something just doesn’t work.  

The romantic tale follows Jessie Buckley’s Anna, a young woman who is seemingly confident that testing to measure whether a couple is in love is the best way to measure a couple’s success.

So, when she gets a job at The Love Institute, she thinks she’ll finally be able to see the inner workings of the process and be there when couples get their results.

On her first day at work, she meets Luke Wilson’s Duncan. He’s the head of the Institute and says he started it to help raise the success rate of couples who have gotten positive tests. Anna gets paired with fellow instructor Amir (Riz Ahmed), who she shadows as she gets familiar with the work.

From the moment Anna meets Amir, it’s clear that there’s a spark. That throws a wrench in the machine that she is now working to improve through these courses at the Institute.

Buckley and Ahmed’s chemistry is fantastic, making the growing tension palpable and the idea of their relationship even more intriguing as it faces the uphill battle of the reality they live in.

Duncan: We’re all achingly lonely and we’re endlessly searching to fill that void. 

It’s even more clearly seen when juxtaposed to Anna and Ryan’s (played by Jeremy Allen White) conversations and time together. There may be love there, but as Ryan mentions several times throughout the movie, there is nothing wrong when a relationship feels like it falls into a routine.

There is something exceptionally bleak about the world Anna lives in. The idea that love is not just an abstract idea that you will “know it when you see it” but rather that it is a quantifiable concept that can be calculated and verify whether partners are truly in love.

The “exercises” they have the couples do at the institute feel absurd and like a way to circumvent the test.

The insistence on showing so many of the couples in Anna and Amir’s group is a subtle way to make the point the writers, Christos Nikou, Sam Starrer, and Stavros Raptis, try to make that Anna’s devoted and determined to make these couples successful while highlighting how wild these obstacles are.

Amir: Watching love stories feels safe, being in love doesn’t.

The acting is excellent, with the core trio of Buckley, Ahmed, and White nailing the more emotional beats. How everyone involved walks the line between sympathetic and not is well done.

I like the way the backdrop plays into the story, the nebulous period translating in terms of set design and costuming with the muted color schemes throughout. It makes the last scene with Anna and Amir stand out.

But it’s the pacing that makes the story languish. The story sags at certain points, namely in the first two acts of the movie.

The third act, when Anna’s world turns upside down and leads to a confrontation of that conflict, is when the movie feels most engaging, aside from the moments when Anna uncovers new truths about both the test and the Love Institute.

Despite the incredible cast, the chemistry between the leads, and the premise, Fingernails suffers at the hands of pacing.

What did you think of this episode of Fingernails? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Fingernails is available to stream on AppleTV+.

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