'Fingernails' review: Love gets put to the ultimate test

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Here's a radical way to cut down on the divorce rate: design a test that will definitively tell two people whether they're in love, based on science. All it takes is a fingernail to be torn off each person and put into a machine, which will offer one of three readings: 100%, meaning both parties are in love; 50%, in which only one of the two has those feelings; or 0%, in which case, sorry, game over.

Go through this process at the center of the new movie "Fingernails," and no doubt remains as to whether a partnership will be happy and stand the test of time. 

But it might just be that the heart cannot be reduced to a technological equation. That's the dilemma facing Anna (Jessie Buckley), who has 100% matched with her boyfriend, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White of "The Bear"). Science says she should not, then, feel the way she begins to feel about Amir (Riz Ahmed), her co-worker at an institute geared toward teaching couples how to fall in love and pass the test.

The sci-fi romance co-stars Luke Wilson and Annie Murphy, and comes from filmmaker Christos Nikou.

MY SAY The "Fingernails" test plays as the next generation of the "love industrial complex" as it exists today, an array of dating apps and other matchmaking tools and algorithms all geared toward bringing order to a disorderly phenomenon. 

Nikou carefully establishes the clinical approach to reducing all of this into a cut-and-dry scientific test in this near-future, in a city that looks a lot like New York and a world that otherwise seems to closely resemble our own.

Couples participating in the training institute, under the direction of Anna and Amir, sing karaoke in French (because it's a romantic language, of course), sky-dive and get taken through other carefully calibrated activities to make love grow, thereby enhancing the probability of passing the test.

In this world, the test results are definitive: Even as Anna's relationship with Ryan starts to sink into the doldrums of a routine, they've had a positive result, the data says what it says, and there's no debating it.

And yet, with Amir, there's something there: it's real, it's powerful, it cannot be avoided. 

The characters do not resist the feelings, but they struggle all the same: this sort of attraction simply should not happen, not when you have tested positive with someone else, not in a way that directly defies the most basic understanding of how the world works.

That's a complicated emotional universe to convey, the experience of going through something powerful and undefinable that also makes no sense. It's expertly captured by Buckley and Ahmed. And as it turns the standards of romantic storytelling on its head, the movie evokes one of the most timeless human impulses: the need to bring structure to chaos and to know the unknowable. 

BOTTOM LINE This is an affecting romance and a work of compelling social commentary. That's a noteworthy achievement.