When All Isn’t Enough

William Bridges and Brett Goldstein have now spun three different properties from the same premise – that in the future a test can match you with your perfect soulmate – and each one of them is titled with the hazy banality of a power ballad: the 2013 short film “For Life,” the 2000 AMC anthology series Soulmates, and now the feature-length romantic drama All of You. That’s telling, at least in the case of the latter, as Bridges and Goldstein’s script hardly bothers explaining the “Soul Connex” technology that kickstarts the plot. Given this is terrain similarly covered in other recent light sci-fis – the tangibly weird Fingernails (like All of You, an Apple Films release) and Black Mirror’s “Hang the DJ,” among others – maybe it’s for the best the futurist plot device is largely ignored. All of You’s heart – and its greatest strength – lies elsewhere, in the human-scaled will-they-or-won’t-they tension between two longtime friends.

Directed by Bridges (a Black Mirror vet) and starring Goldstein (two-time Emmy winner as Ted Lasso’s Roy Kent) with a script credited to both, All of You opens with Londoner Simon accompanying best friend Laura (Poots) to take the test. He cracks wise in the waiting room, though his adoration for her is pretty plain, and he kicks himself for blowing his chance when she gets matched with a guy in Glasgow. Things with her matched mate move fast, which we glean from Simon and Laura’s less frequent encounters; the way editor Victoria Boydell cuts scene to scene poignantly gets at the blinkingness of their get-togethers, and the whole years that pass in between. Goldstein and Poots have an easy rapport, and right away you believe in their long friendship and sublimated, complicated feelings for each other. As time flies by, other people enter the picture – a partner, a child – and Simon and Laura change their jobs and their sense of style, but each reunion revives that spark. It’s undeniable.

Curiously, where the film starts to leak gas is when the nature of their relationship shifts definitively. That relationship, their connection, suffers from the same lack of specificity as the made-up technology the script hand-waved away. There are grand gestures and lines in the sand drawn that go unexplained and unexplored, and their interactions become airless and indistinct and oppressively heavy. There’s still pleasure in their company: Goldstein, better known for his comic work and coming off a wincing dramatic arc on Shrinking, has limited range but nestles into his sweet spot here, a combination of smirking and sincere, and the underrated Poots is magnetic. The script – witty, anemic – only gestures at her character’s chronic depression, but no matter. Poots bodily fills in the blanks, transforming an underwritten part into a complex, rounded person. She’s an original.

⭐⭐⭐

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