★★½ (2½ out of 4)
I saw this movie a year ago at the Toronto Film Festival. Now “All of You” has found its way to Apple TV+, hoping not to fall through the cracks like so many other romcoms that don’t have a horror element to lift them out of streaming limbo. I’m looking at you, “Together,” in which Dave Franco and Alison Brie find their bodies literally and revoltingly fused.
Brett Goldstein and his writing partner, William Bridges in his feature directing debut, have been working on this script for a decade. So clearly for them it touches a nerve. It got on my nerves too, but in the irritating sense of the phrase.
“All of You” lacks the ick factor, but it does have a sci-fi element in the form of a billboard that claims you can find your true soulmate through science. Does RFK Jr. know about this? There are no vaccines involved, just one painless retina scan and you’re romantically set for life.
It all sounds like a scam to Simon, played by Brett Goldstein, the Brit actor and podcaster who’s won two Emmys so far for “Ted Lasso” in which his hilarious footballer, Roy Kent, is the definition of anger mismanagement. As Simon, Goldstein has his rage under control even though his college best friend, Laura (Imogen Poots), is trying his patience.
Laura thinks the soulmate test is a fine idea. Simon does not. He believes matchmaking should be done the hard way, trial and error and all that. Clearly, he loves Laura and she him, except it takes a two-hour movie and years of bad choices to sort it all out.
Goldstein and his writing partner, William Bridges in his feature directing debut, have been working on this script for a decade. So clearly for them it touches a nerve. It got on my nerves too, but in the irritating sense of the phrase.
What saves the movie, and it’s a big save, are the performances. Goldstein handles the love stuff in ways that lean more toward bittersweet than sappy. And Poots, in the more difficult role of a woman who can’t make up her mind, scores so high on the charm meter that, just like Simon, we’ll follow her anywhere.
That means through her marriage to boring Lukas (Steven Cree) and the birth of their daughter. Lucas actually passed the soulmate eye test, which proves it’s worthless. As for Simon, he drifts through affairs with women, nicely played by Zawe Ashton and Jenna Coleman, until he and Laura own up to their attraction at the same time, never mind the mess they’ve made of their lives in the process.
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Since Bridges was a contributor to the bizarrely experimental “Black Mirror,” I kept wishing for something surreal and wicked to screw with the conventional drift of “All of You.” No such luck. Though “All of You” skirts the standard-issue happy ending, a romance that ends on a note of resignation hardly matches the aching heartache of, say, Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were.”