Best friends Simon (Brett Goldstein) and Laura (Imogen Poots) struggle to navigate their mutual romantic feelings after Laura takes a test that promises to match her to her soulmate.
The idea of dating app algorithms eventually finding us a perfect partner is potent and ever-prevalent. Sci-fi shows like Black Mirror and Rick And Morty have toyed with the idea that our tech overlords have all the amorous answers — cupid’s arrow in a smartphone. Now comes All Of You, a part weepy, part tragicomedy, part adulterous romance, which ponders the same question very lightly but likably. It comes from Brett Goldstein (actor and co-writer) and William Bridges (co-writer and director), the team behind the 2020 anthology series Soulmates, which had essentially the same premise, this feeling like a feature-length episode of that show.
Goldstein plays Simon, a character softer and sillier than his Ted Lasso Roy Kent persona, albeit still possessing a well-stocked wardrobe of dark-black shirts. We first meet him escorting university BFF Laura (Vivarium‘s Imogen Poots) to take “the test” for a heavily advertised service known as Soul Connex, which promises to scan your eye and — with methods never fully explained, the filmmakers content to leave the science-fiction a background dressing — identify your one, true soulmate.
When the sexy floodgates open it feels real and believable, the pair forging an illicit affair with genuine passion and feeling.
Goldstein and Poots have an easy, effortless chemistry, assisted by the warm, witty, distinctly British writing. These are the kind of friends who give each other shit, complain about being grown-ups, and affectionately greet each other with, “Hello, dickhead!” So strong is their connection, in fact, that it feels quite confusing why these two funny, hot, single people, who clearly enjoy each other’s company, wouldn’t immediately get together. Why even bother taking “the test”?
Far from being an intriguing or cannily explored speculative fiction device, “the test” seems more like a slight contrivance, to delay the inevitable, what everyone except the characters should find obvious. The narrative skips across months and years as Laura does indeed get married to her poor purported soulmate Lukas (an incorrigibly nice Steven Cree), while tension — sexual and otherwise — builds between Simon and Laura.
When the sexy floodgates open it feels real and believable, the pair forging an illicit affair with genuine passion and feeling. But that initial tension trickles off in the latter half, when further obstacles helpfully wander into view (an office opening in Hong Kong, a job offer in America) and the film seemingly forgets its near-future premise — not to mention the occasional egregious Americanism (no self-respecting British person would ever use the phrase “parking lot”).
Still, even if it ends soapier than it starts, Goldstein and Poots are extremely watchable leads throughout: utterly charming, charismatic and kind. Theirs feels like a relationship as lived-in as a bit of moth-eaten knitwear, cosy and safe and warm.
All Of You might only work for some of you, but the easy, insatiable fire between Goldstein and Poots is undeniable.