Fingernails

Directed by Christos Nikou, Fingernails unfolds within a surreal landscape in which love can be measured via a series of tests and the removal of a fingernail. It’s an incredibly stupid premise that’s employed to pervasively (and astonishingly) underwhelming and tedious effect by Nikou, as the filmmaker, working from a script written alongside Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, delivers an exceedingly, excessively sluggish endeavor that does, thanks to its off-putting, hopelessly quirky atmosphere, strike all the wrong notes right from the word go – with the far-from-engaging vibe compounded by a handful of aggressively obnoxious attributes and elements (eg Christopher Stracey’s nails-on-a-chalkboard score and Marcell Rév’s drab cinematography. (It doesn’t help, either, that the rules of the aforementioned love test aren’t even made all that clear, nor is it apparent why anybody would subject themselves to it.) And while Nikou admittedly does elicit strong work from his various performers, Fingernails‘ arms-length sensibilities render its few positives moot and it is, to an increasingly distressing extent, impossible not to wonder just what Nikou initially set out to accomplish with this impenetrable mess – with the final result one of the most annoying, unpleasant pictures to come around in quite some time. (And what’s with the interminable, endless 113 minute runtime?)

no stars out of ****