Fingernails: A Failed Black Mirror Movie

I gave myself a loose, enticing mission earlier this year: to watch many of the films of Jessie Buckley, now the newest Best Actress winner at the Academy Awards for her role in a film I didn't like. My Hamnet hate, however, must be saved for another post, because this one is about sci-fi stinker Fingernails (2023).

She wears some very good jumpers.

In this film, she is Anna, a woman with a striking art school haircut who works at the fingernail-plucking office, and whose fingernail tests kind of fuck up her life. You see, in this world, you can perform a simple compatability test on the fingernails of two people (which they have to have ripped out - don't worry, this is apparently very easy to do with pliers!) which will determine whether they have "true love".

Now, you're probably asking "what the hell does that mean?" And the thing is, I don't know. The movie obfuscates much of its central premise in a way that utterly destroys all narrative tension, and leaves you in the viewer's swamp, the place where you go when the internal logic of a movie is unconnected nonsense. I think the love test and its result are meant to act as an allegory for the concept of certainty itself - to get at the very boring and predictable idea that you can choose to go by the result or not, that there can be no real guarantees in love - but the actual reality of the idea of the love test in the world it inhabits is logically inconsistent at best and absolutely meaningless at worst.

Jessie Buckley's Anna has a nice boyfriend, played by Jeremy Allen White in one of those cool 1970s shearling jackets, and he is an iconically gentle, beautifully absent man. He has the glossy eyes of a doll, and the kind of calm acceptance of a lone sheep atop a hill. I love him. And I love them together. They both have an odd energy that seems to complement the other. But alas, despite their POSITIVE TRUE LOVE TEST, established at the beginning of the movie, Anna meets and becomes obsessed with a different, worse guy at work.

She wants to watch Marty Supreme so bad.

Here it becomes an excruciating romcom with an irritating gimmick. Anna and her new love interest work on basically preparing fun dates for couples who are about to take the love test. The idea is that they are doing vague scientific experiments to figure out how they can encourage positive tests, but it's all really dull, obvious stuff like singing love songs to each other, or going on thrill rides together. Y'know, to bond. If all of this random crap can so influence the love test into saying two people are in love, then how is the test reliable? And yes, they do say explicitly that the test lets you know "if you're in love", which is weird, because we can already know that about ourselves and pretty easily find it out about other people. Why would I pull my fingernail out to know something my mind can tell me?

More impeccable knitwear.

The new guy is, tragically, not a remotely interesting character to watch. We see domestic scenes with Anna and her Jeremy Allen White and they have this wonderful, almost ethereal connection. We watch Anna with this new guy and they feel empty. The movie is telling me this is passion, this is romance, and all I can think is: this is boring. Maybe this could work if her pursuit of this man was framed as doomed and sinister, that the love test was ultimately correct in some absolute way after all, but ultimately the conclusion is much more straightforward: did you know, you can just ignore the test that everyone in the world is obsessed with? Wow!

Jeremy Allen White is happy to do the test again, to rip out another fingernail, to soothe Anna after she tests her nail against her coworker's on a whim. Anna rips out many of her fingernails in distress, because this movie wants us to think as much as possible about fingernails getting ripped out. And again, why they are doing this, I don't know. Jeremy Allen White and Anna love each other, as confirmed by their brand new nails test. The other guy loves her, but she doesn't love him, or something. And so, she abandons her dog-like Calvin Klein underwear model for the dweeb she doesn't love, and she says, "I don't care about the nail test". So what was the fingernail test testing? What does love mean if you can just choose the other guy anyway because you, I guess, love him? It just doesn't add up.

Jessie Buckley plays Anna with a beautiful latent madness, but the movie itself crumbles completely under the weight of its own ill-thought-out concept. I reject this and substitute it for my own perfect ending: Anna and Jeremy Allen White stay together. They just chill on the couch.

One ripped-out fingernail out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆