TIFF24 REVIEW: All of You [2025]

Rating: R | Runtime: 98 minutes
Release Date: September 26th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Apple TV+
Director(s): William Bridges
Writer(s): William Bridges & Brett Goldstein

We’ve lost too many good people to this test.

When we meet Simon (Brett Goldstein) and Laura (Imogen Poots), they’re on their way to the testing center to find out who her soulmate is. He’s joking that she’s making a mistake because letting science dictate who you should marry is akin to giving up on life’s mystery and adventure. She finds comfort in it, though. Not because she wants to take herself out of the equation, but because she finds marriage serves a purpose wherein security matters most and isn’t something we should leave to fate. Fast-forward a few weeks or months and Laura is on the road to engagement with Lukas (Steven Cree) while Simon is still left searching.

Goldstein and director William Bridges have been working on the script for All of You for the past fifteen years after meeting on the set of a different romance and coming up with the sci-fi concept herein. I therefore wonder what they thought about Fingernails when it was released last year since it has a very similar construct. The difference is that it concerns a woman who questions the result of her true love test and how that uncertainty eats away at her relationship while perhaps overstepping her boundaries outside of it. This one is about the consequences of regret—not in the test, but in waiting too long to declare one’s love.

Because Simon and Laura are in love. Whether they’ll admit it to each other or themselves, they possess a chemistry that has us believing they won’t drift apart like so many of their friends did upon taking the test, getting hitched, and leaving to fulfill the capitalistic duties of said union. Who’s to say it isn’t Laura deciding to follow the herd that finally allows them to open their eyes to the possibility? Maybe their friendship needed that barrier towards romantic love to give their yearning life. Either way, the “soulmate” thing is merely a catalyst for what follows. A crutch Laura can wield to prevent herself from throwing what she has with Lukas away.

We want her to, though, because Bridges and Goldstein created a textbook friends-to-lovers scenario wherein we demand satisfaction in the form of true love conquering all. Except they’ve also transformed “true love” into the largest obstacle in their way, forcing us to reconsider what it is we want from this archetype. Is it just lust? That sexually charged longing of never having the courage to find out and/or the forbidden desire inherent to wanting it despite one or both being attached to someone else? Maybe. We self-insert and imagine some hypothetical “what if” in our own lives that we can’t ever know would have worked anyway. It’s a fantasy that excels in the unknown.

Strip chance from the equation and it loses its excitement. That’s what Simon means when he tells Laura she’s making a mistake. Not because he doesn’t think it will work, but because she’s making it so it can’t fail. She’s introducing chicken and egg scenarios wherein she’ll never know for sure if she loves Lukas because their connection is real or because her brain refuses to consider the implications of the lab tech being wrong. We conversely know her connection with Simon is genuine. Enough to pivot from the cool ease of friendship into the messiness of romance? That’s why they call it “taking the plunge.” Intellectualizing gets you nowhere. Make your move.

The sad truth is that many don’t. They have “the one that got away” instead. Even some who have “the one they adore” still have someone who could have fit that role too if things were different. That’s the strength of what All of You provides. Not just a reason to push Simon and Laura together so they must sink or swim, but also a reason to ensure they’ll always be too late. Because no matter how much they do love each other and how much they’ll risk everything to be together, Simon wouldn’t simply be asking Laura to get a divorce. Divorce is what happens when a human chooses poorly. Science, on the other hand, doesn’t make mistakes.

I love the ideas that Bridges and Goldstein have packed into this script and I enjoy the structure of letting decades pass without clearly defining the specific chunks of time that transpired between jump cuts. I love the two central performances (Goldstein has never been better and Poots maintains her place as one of the most underrated actors of her generation) as well as the supporting roles from Cree and Zawe Ashton as Andrea, a friend Laura sets Simon up with. I even applaud the honesty in how these characters revolt against reason and/or emotion depending on what will destroy them more. Sometimes we must accept the thing we want most isn’t meant to be.

All that said, however, something about the finished piece just didn’t fully gel for me. Fingernails has bigger issues, but this one still doesn’t quite stick the landing—maybe because the concept itself is flawed or because I’m too much of a romantic to be able to consider why someone would actually want to take that test. In the end, we got where we always knew we were going. For all the promise of a new spin via its sci-fi trappings, All of You is ultimately a familiar story told familiarly with a fresh coat of paint. It’s a well-made and effective facsimile, but I wonder if it missed its potential to say more.