‘All of You’ Review: Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots’ Chemistry Can’t Save an Underdeveloped, Badly Paced Sci-Fi Romance | TIFF

Every year, the Toronto International Film Festival has a handful of small scale science fiction relationship dramas, all hoping to be the next Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – if they don’t get erased from your memory first. In 2024, this section of the lineup includes such films as Daniela Forever, Do I Know You From Somewhere?, and the subject of this review, All of You.

All of You, directed by William Bridges and co-written by Bridges and actor Brett Goldstein, takes place in a world where a company called Soul Connex has cracked the algorithm to find people’s perfect soulmates. Simon (Goldstein) refuses to use Soul Connex himself, but he accompanies his best friend Laura (Imogen Poots) as she goes through the process. Over large jumps in time, we see how Simon and Laura’s friendship – and not-so-hidden curiosity in something more with one another, her test results be damned – evolves as she dates, marries, and has children with her predestined match Lukas (Steven Kree).

You wouldn’t know it from TIFF’s description, but it seems that All of You is loosely a movie adaptation for Bridges and Goldstein’s AMC TV series Soulmates. Not that you need to watch the show to follow the movie — it’s an anthology series where every episode stands alone — but it’s the same world with the same premise: seeing how different people deal with love and relationships in a world where science can determine soulmates. Soulmates ended up one of a number of victims of the end of “peak TV,” renewed in advance for a second season only to get that renewal retracted after the fact. Having never watched Soulmates, I wish that its fans got their season 2 – because I was not a fan of this film version.

That’s not the fault of the actors, who have enough charm to prevent All of You from being a total wash. Goldstein fits comfortably into his Ted Lasso persona of a gruff cynic with a soft side; with his comedic talent, I’m sure he contributed a lot of the film’s sharper one-liners. Poots, meanwhile, capably handles the task of maintaining some degree of audience sympathy for a rather unlikable character who repeatedly makes the most frustrating decisions. The two leads have enough chemistry with one another to carry some interest in seeing how their friendship and eventual affair evolves.

Tracking that evolution, however, is made frustrating by the awkward staccato editing. The leaps ahead in time don’t occur with any clear transitions – they just happen, and it can take a while to figure out how much time has passed between each of Simon and Laura’s meetings. Given just how much time passes, it also feels weird just how static the setting remains. Is the soulmate formula the only major technological innovation in all this time? Even if it is, shouldn’t we see more of how much it’s actively changed society beyond just the numbers of happy matches on billboards going up? Maybe the Soulmates TV series offers a better fleshing out of this premise, but All of You barely digs into its own sci-fi hook. Its refusal to take clear a side for or against the algorithm may be meant to spark debate amongst the audience, but the weakness of the worldbuilding makes such debates a lot less interesting to have.

So without the sci-fi elements, what’s left in All of You? You basically have Past Lives if everyone was less likable and made worse choices, if the storytelling was repetitive and tiresome, and if it didn’t have any of the beautiful artistry that Celine Song brought to her exploration of romantic destiny. All of You looks like a middle-of-the-road streaming movie, competent but completely bland visually. Likewise, the musical score is completely forgettable.

Bridges co-wrote two episodes of Black Mirror; his Emmy-winning Season 4 episode, “U.S.S. Callister,”is one I’d rank among the show’s best. Curiously, the other big highlight of that Black Mirror season, “Hang the DJ,” which Bridges did not write, played with the premise of technology determining romantic matches in a way that was clever, thought-provoking, and a lot of fun. If All of You is Bridges’ attempt at making his own “Hang the DJ,” it’s an inferior one. It may connect with others more, but even with good acting and some decent humor, it didn’t connect with me at all. And this is the last I expect to think about it ever again.

Grade: C

This review is from the Toronto International Film Festival. There is currently no U.S. distribution.