Fingernails

One is a form of torture, the other is a movie released by Apple.
You figure out which is which.
dir: Christos Nikou
2023
Fingernails is an anti-rom com which is still somewhat a rom com. It almost acts as a parody of rom coms, while using the tropes of rom coms to further its belief that love is and always should be inexplicable.
This is the least science-fiction-y science fiction based flick that you could ever watch. There’s nothing depicted that looks like anything that you wouldn’t have seen in the 1980s-1990s. But conceptually we are dealing with a world where people can get scientific confirmation as to whether, as a couple, they are truly in love.
So. If “love” becomes measurable and quantifiable, what does that mean for actual relationships?
In this cowardly old world, when a couple have been together for a while, they go to a place, the Love Institute, and have one of their fingernails ripped off. The two fingernails are put into a machine, and then the machine divines whether the two people are perfectly in love with each other.
Most couples who take the test fail. Get zero per cent. Other couples get a 50 per cent result, meaning one person loves the other more, or that one of them is faking it till they make it.
What this means is, I guess, people who don’t pass the test don’t stay together as couples. People who refuse to do the test don’t stay together, because someone will always doubt the other’s commitment.
And even couples who do the test, and get 100 per cent positive results, well, even they have their doubts.
Anna (the great Jessie Buckley, who is mastering the art of being really good in complicated films that don’t always work) is in a relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White, who most people know as the hot chef guy from The Bear). They’ve passed the test. 100 %. What more could anyone want?