Fingernails is a sci-fi romantic drama currently playing on Apple TV+. It posits that, at some unspecified future time, a sizable segment of the population will blandly submit to a test conducted at the “Love Institute,” which is experimenting with how to remove the risk factor from love by scientifically determining if people are wisely partnered in life. In order to do the test, each person agrees to have one fingernail ripped out and run through a gizmometer that tells them if their current match is “positive” or “negative.”

Then, no matter how happy or unhappy they were before, they opt to obey the test and either split up or stay together based on the results. No totalitarian entity is forcing them to do these things.

Look, I’m as ready as the next chump to accept wild sci-fi premises, and even wilder romantic drama premises, for the sake of narrative payoffs later on. But the minute you see the first fingernail-ripping-out scene treated as “just a scratch,” apparently with minimal gasps of pain and a few drops of blood, and nobody rolling around on the floor screeching in agony afterward, your whole sensory system rebels against this film, and you say, “Nope.”