‘Fingernails’: Read The Screenplay For Christos Nikou’s Surreal Look At Love That Pulls Out All The Stops

Patrick Hipes
·2 min read

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Fingernails, the Apple Original Films sci-fi love story of sorts that marks the English-language debut of Greek writer-director Christos Nikou. It came off the success of his debut pic Apples, which was Greece’s submission to last year’s Oscar race.

Fingernails, which features a cast including Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson and Annie Murphy, premiered at this year’s Telluride Film Festival and hit theaters and Apple TV+ earlier this month. It reunites the Apples executive producing team of Nikou and Dirty Films and partners Cate Blanchett, Coco Francini and Andrew Upton. FilmNation Entertainment’s Lucas Wiesendanger is also a producer.

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The script was penned by Nikou and his Apples co-screenwriter and pal Stavros Raptis, joined by UK scribe Sam Steiner after Nikou read Steiner’s script for Morning (now in development with Justin Kurzel). The trio, writing Fingernails together in Greece, ultimately fixed on the idea of an ultimate test for love, one offering scientific proof of that it exists in coupled relationships.

That resulted in the movie’s action taking place in the near future inside a fictional love institute, where couples undergo a procedure that goes way beyond dating apps: fingernails are extracted from both parties and placed in a machine to determine whether their devotion to one another is real. Anna (Buckley) is skeptical of a positive result she’s received with her longtime partner Ryan (White), so she starts working in a love institute as an assistant to Trevor (Ahmed), a mysterious and dedicated instructor, to learn more.

When you are in love “you need to feel a little bit of pain,” said Nikou at Deadline’s recent Contenders Film: London. “So, we’re trying to make the pain of love equal to the physical pain.”

The result is a surreal movie that is part sci-fi, part love story, part gross-out body horror but decidedly bittersweet comical in tone, examining the lengths modern couples go in maintaining their relationships.

Click below to read the script.

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