Film Journal 2023: Fingernails

Film Journal 2023: Fingernails
Directed by Christos Nikos


A brilliant premise undercut by an unsatisfying ending. For me, the overall experience still held up though, finding ways to take a particular concept/idea with a particular focus and applying it to some lofty and important cultural and societal realities.

The premise is simple. Our main character, a youngish woman trying to figure out her life, exists in a world where a controversial procedure involving the scientific analysis of fingernails has become a culturally accepted means of determining relational compatibility. The young woman’s current point of crisis revolves around her search for employment, but as the film goes on another crisis takes center stage- she starts to question her relationship to her partner, throwing her entire worldview into disarray. What if her entire conception of love as something we can tangibly study and analyze and understand and control is not trustworthy? What if the science has been left wanting? What if our confidence in humanity and each other is undercut? What if we can longer trust ourselves?

This is where the personal commentary bleeds into a broader commentary, echoing some of the touchpoints of what has been largely coined as the great meaning crisis of our modern times. At the heart of the film sits these poignant questions about what happens when the systems that inform our pursuit of knowledge and give it reason and purpose begin to fail us. What happens when our need to understand and know the nature of human and social function confronts us with a conception of humanity and social constructions that crumble under the weight of such reductions to simple facts and data points. All of this forms a solid playing field for the kind of existential crisis the film wants to confront, especially where it pertains to the question of authenticity.

There is no mistaking the heavy parallels to our present fascination with things like the enneagram, or even the gradual push into genetics. Taking the fingernail test to determine whether a relationship is compatible and to assess the likelihood of its success is akin to taking a personality test that allows us to locate how given we are to specific character traits. Both are anchored in physiology/biology. Both offer the same appeal to some level of promise and trustworthiness in the science. They invite us to place our trust in a certain kind of knowledge of our biological selves and the material world we occupy. However when the world that surrounds this knowledge begins to show cracks in terms of its ability to afford us meaning, it leaves such knowledge inevitably appealing to illusions rather than to reality. In these moments, what do we trust? How do we trust? Who do we trust? This is one of the big dilemmas that the present meaning crisis is concerned about. Where does the social construction give way to something true? Where do we reconcile the failure of these systems and worldviews to satisfy our need to know something such as love as a reality that exists beyond such reductions? When such forms of knowledge appear to have failed us and have been left wanting, how do we in turn give ourselves to the experiences of reality itself?

Big ideas. As I mentioned above, the ending takes these ideas and ultimately narrows it to a social construction in response- individualism. Or perhaps its better known form- individual liberty. It seems to suggest that the answer, even if its not clearly stated, can be found in slipping between the notion that we are products of our environment and creations of these socially constructed realities, and somehow exist apart from these things as an individual entity free to become our own selves. Perhaps most apparent is that this effectively underides the moral truths and values the film wants to bring to the table as necessary universals and given foundations for thinking about the crisis. The ending ends up feeling every bit the illusion and question as the thing it is battling against.

As momentary experiences go though, I was drawn in by the premise, fascinated by the characters and performances, and genuinely invested in the dance that leads up to the ending. Whatever reframing the ending does, or at least tries to do, this aspect held up for me as worthwhile and effective.