Like that earlier film, which was set in a kind of timeless, retro-futuristic dystopia without cellphones, and in which cassette tape players were used as therapeutic tools to treat an epidemic of amnesia — a world of not quite yesterday, today or tomorrow, but somewhere in between — “Fingernails” takes place in a universe that only in some respects resembles our own. People are still tormented by the uncertainties of romance: Are we meant for each other? Will this end in heartache? And all the other mysteries of the ages that Taylor Swift has made a career out of singing about.
But in the wake of some unspecified pandemic-like “crisis” precipitated by the unpredictability of passion, a solution has been found. The technology has been discovered, at a place called the Love Institute, for couples to determine whether Cupid’s aim is true. All it entails is ripping out a single fingernail from the hand of each partner — straight from the nail bed, without anesthesia and using pliers — and sticking the bloody hunks of keratin inside a device that resembles a Soviet-era microwave attached to an old cathode-ray-tube computer monitor. After a few seconds, the results are in: positive, meaning your love is real; negative, meaning it isn’t; or “50 percent,” meaning one of you just ain’t feeling it. (Though which one is heartless is impossible to say. Another form of suffering!)
Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White are the couple at the center of this tale, which ends up being exactly as nutty as it sounds. They’ve already been tested: positive, and they have the certificate to prove it. But it isn’t hard to tell, from such unscientific evidence as the way one’s lip trembles or the little white lie the other tells, that there may be trouble in paradise. When Buckley’s Anna takes a job administering tests and relationship training at the Institute, working with Riz Ahmed’s handsome charmer Amir — all under the watchful eye of the Institute’s goofy founder (Luke Wilson) — “Fingernails” takes on the contours of a standard love triangle, albeit one whose circumstances we haven’t quite seen the likes of before. The cast is excellent all around.
It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness. If “Apples” was odd, too, in a way that flirted with preciousness, it nevertheless managed to avoid outright illogic, performing a gingerly dance between the sublime and the stupid. A society that has late-model cars and recorded music, but no OxyContin? (Test subjects bite down on wooden dowels during the extraction, and film cameras are still in common use.) Exactly where/when is this taking place?
Torture as a metaphor for love misses the mark as well. If Nikou, who co-wrote the screenplay with his “Apples” collaborator Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, wants to mock rom-coms or unrequited romances, he’s barking up the wrong tree. All he needs to do is listen to the 1967 Young Rascals song “How Can I Be Sure?” to know where the pain comes from: It’s not the knowing that hurts, but the not knowing.
R. At area theaters; also available on Apple TV Plus. Contains strong language and, well, fingernail pulling. 112 minutes.