“All of You” (2025) is about two pretty people who are in love with each other and cannot make it work. Simon (Brett Goldstein, who also cowrites) and Laura (Imogen Poots) are best friends from college who were never in a romantic relationship despite everyone except them seeing the chemistry. Soul Connex is a widely advertised and popular test that promises to find your soul mate. Laura decides to take the test while Simon prefers to find the one. Is it the beginning of the end of their relationship?
Goldstein and Poots have plenty of chemistry as friends and potentially more. Simon keeps things light with his constant teasing, which is a smidge passive aggressive, and makes Laura laugh. If he has a fatal flaw, it is his inability to say what he knows at the right time, including “do not take the test because I’m in love with you.” Somehow Goldstein makes these qualities charming instead of aggravating, which is what it actually is. The looks and the accent help. He is worried that anyone who takes the test disappears from their friends’ lives, but that is married people in general. It is a forgivable error since everyone only lives once. The fear of loss of friendship and love is a universal, relatable concern. There are points when he clearly should stop letting himself get tortured, but he does not. Since secondhand embarrassment is my horror movie, there is a point where “All of You” becomes the kind of movie that makes me want to scream at the screen, “Runnnnnn!”
Laura could be the villain, but more because Laura is a mess than a horrible person. Poots plays her like a woman on automatic who is running away from self-awareness, and in one scene when a friend decides to take the test because of how happy she is, Poots manages to look absolutely stricken because she is not, but if she acknowledges it, she consigns herself to a life of misery. Laura is eager to take the test to find her footing since she is a bit of a wild child, but it is unclear if Simon had declared his love at the right time whether Laura would accept or if she likes having a roster of men who serve different functions. Laura is the kind of person that makes empty promises that she means while others know that the probability of Laura fulfilling them is tenuous at best.
“All of You” is appealing to watch because who does not want to see the lived-in side of urbane, young metropolitan life. Cinematographer Benoit Soler layers a slick sheen to the proceedings. Before the pair face the truth about their feelings for each other, the rhythm is undeniable. It is a series of vignettes showing the state of their relationship as if there is an invisible clock showing how the outside world is closing in on separating them. It also is marked with milestones in their lives. The first act surrounds the test. The second act involves Laura introducing Simon to her friend, Andrea (Zawe Ashton), as if she is setting the two up as an insurance plan to neuter and keep him from other women who could be more of a rival. The third act is when Simon races Laura to the hospital and introduces Lukas (Steven Cree) on screen for the first time.
The fourth act is a double date between Laura and Lukas and Simon and Andrea. There is a great scene in this section when Laura says some beautiful words about Lukas, but the camera focuses on Simon as she says them. Up to that point, “All of You” only shows Simon fulfilling that function, not Lukas. it feels like a gut punch, which makes Laura seem insensitive and entitled, but she is supposed to feel that way and say those things about her husband. On the other hand, how can she not know or verbalize acknowledgment for Simon.
For all of you complaining that movies are antiseptic and sexless, “All of You” should make you happy. There is plenty of simulated sex and nudity. The rhythm kind of falls apart after the fourth act and becomes one large mass of them accepting the truth but not acting on it in a sustainable way. There is a push and pull relationship with plenty of angst, and that kind of dynamic is only interesting to the people inside the relationship, not the bystanders. It is also at this point when the audience must accept that there is more talking than showing. For example, around forty-two minutes in, the pair talk about an offscreen blow up, which seems kind of crucial and would not be known if it was not mentioned. When Simon and Laura meet up, they are a bit uneasy, but nothing that indicates the turmoil and violent emotions that they speak about. Sure, they are British, but damn.
Also, “All of You” exposes that “will they or won’t they” tropes are only interesting if they are never resolved. Simon and Laura are more interesting in a community but one-on-one, they become boring. Laura will not leave her husband. Simon wants commitment. Rinse. Repeat. Because it is such a smooth movie with no serious problems, all the narrative tension rests on their annoying debate. It feels like a movie that wants them to fail but cannot break out of monotony. The movie briefly picks up the pace during a magnificent wedding sequence when Lukas seeks out Simon, and the tension is whether there will be a confrontation, but Lukas just ends up becoming a nominee for best husband ever who just wants his wife to have healthy relationships outside of their family. Side note: a trope seems to be emerging with this movie and “The Threesome” (2025) where all the diversity is limited to a wedding to show how awesome the characters and society are to LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Ashton ends up being the most memorable, nuanced character and doing all the heavy lifting so when she disappears, it is like losing the cornerstone of “All of You,” especially since she is the only onscreen witness to the central relationship. How the modelesque Ashton hides her light under a bushel in the second act to seem like a normal person is already Oscar worthy, but by the fourth act, Ashton, cowriter and director William Bridges and editor Victoria Boydell depict the most emotionally rigorous scene to show exactly when Andrea realizes that she is on a date with herself. It is devastating. If you have a friend like Laura, dump her. She is the worst friend to Andrea and messed her up twice.
For those potential viewers interested in the sci-fi aspect of the story, turn around. It is not even billed on IMDb as belonging to the sci-fi genre. The test is an example of “premise fiction” to explore realistic reaction to an extraordinary event. There is never any explanation of how it works, and the concept of the test gets dropped for huge swaths of “All of You.” Though irrelevant and a completely different movie, it would have been fun to see lawsuits since clearly it did not work. Normally I hate a movie that ends with a trial to wrap up a movie instead of a real ending, but all I could think was class action lawsuit.
If you love movies where love is like a death sentence full of longing, then “All of You” is for you. It is a beautiful movie to look at. The acting is organic. The lifestyle is smooth and unwrinkled. For the rest of us with friends who refuse to do what would make them happy and put everyone out of their misery as if they were RFK with vaccines, dip out after the fifth act and write your own movie. At least it is better than “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (2025).
