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At last year’s Toronto film festival, British romance All of You premiered at a time when we were starting to feel a little fatigued with films like it. The drama was one of the many Black Mirror-adjacent dystopias of that time, shown at the same festival as The Assessment (what if the right to have children was decided by someone else) and Daniela Forever (what if a lucid dream trial could reunite you with a dead partner). The year before had seen The Pod Generation (what if babies could be grown in artificial wombs), Foe (what if a body double could take your place) and Fingernails (what if true love had to be scientifically proven) and given the mostly subpar quality of them, we had started to dream of our own radical future, a land where these copycats ceased to exist.
After a lowkey festival debut, overshadowed by splashier fare, the film was picked up by Apple, neatly fitting into the platform’s tech-tinged fare (as well as the aforementioned Fingernails, the streamer also has Swan Song aka what if a clone could live your life after death). To its credit, All of You is one of the least egregious of an increasingly egregious subgenre, a surprise given its heritage. It’s directed and co-written by William Bridges, whose credits include not only Black Mirror (he wrote Shut Up and Dance and co-wrote both USS Callisters) but the instantly forgettable rip-off series Soulmates, a one season dud that did the “what if” but for a genetic love test. Bridges created that show with Ted Lasso breakout Brett Goldstein and the pair remain convinced of their concept, reusing it here, even down to the name of the company involved (Soul Connex). It makes the film a sort of strange spin-off, a continuation after a cancelled second season, fan service for fans who don’t seem to exist.
Not that it’s a hard film to understand otherwise, a simple setup – what if a test could match you with your soulmate – serving as the jump-off for a rather conventional relationship drama. We start with college friends Laura (Imogen Poots) and Simon (Goldstein himself) as he takes her to get the test. He’s unconvinced by the idea but she’s determined, and the film then flashes forward to selected moments over the next few years; Laura finds her soulmate, Simon realises he has feelings for her, they drift apart and back together, other people came and go.
It reminded me of a Drake Doremus movie, for better and worse. He broke out with 2011’s Like Crazy, a genuinely wrenching drama about the awfully relatable pain of a long-distance relationship, but has struggled to recapture that intensity since. His films tend to star attractive actors, cooly dealing with love and sex and the messiness in-between and often, like in Equals and Zoe, he also brings in a sci-fi element (what if emotions were treated as a disease and what if compatibility was scientifically testable, respectively). While never as consuming as Like Crazy, there’s a similarly effective structure here, a way to concisely involve us in the incremental toll of loving someone you can’t quite find a way to be with. Each time we leap forward, we have to get our bearings – who’s with who, is this a happy period or a sad one – and we start to understand the grind of it that more easily, the film paced so that we never get too far into a moment we’ve already got enough from.
The sci-fi gimmick is surprisingly well-used, in smart and sparing ways. The initial burst of Soul Connex commercials across London feel eerily of-the-moment, given the influx of ads for both AI and Ozempic that we’re now flooded with, and while it does lead to some briefly knotty dinner party debate, it’s mostly just a heightened replacement for something many of us already know, a reason not to be with someone. In the film, Laura can’t be with Simon because she’s married to her soulmate, and while here that might be a proven scientific fact, she’s as smugly convinced as someone would be without that surety.
But like with the lesser Doremus films, All of You can also struggle to transport us to the heady highs and weepy lows its characters are feeling. Poots almost gets us there, a naturally charming performer who is both funny in her (slightly underbaked) banter with Goldstein and crushing when the weight of her decisions start to break her (one day she will make for a top-tier rom-com lead). But an unsure and underpowered Goldstein isn’t quite up to the challenge, easily overshadowed by her more nuanced and experienced work, and it leaves an imbalance in our investment, not helped by the film choosing to stick in a lower gear for too long (one argument, where the pair spar over not showing, ahem, all of themselves to the other, is not quite cutting enough). It’s a calm, crisply made film (one can again see how it matches the Apple aesthetic) but one about heartache and tumult, and I found myself craving something that felt as difficult and stinging as the feelings it was trying to stir up.
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All of You is out on Apple TV+ on 26 September
