TL;DR: Apple’s All of You is a modest sci-fi romance about soulmate testing, anchored by Imogen Poots’ stellar performance but dragged down by Brett Goldstein’s underpowered turn and an over-polished Apple aesthetic. Watchable but forgettable.

I’ve started to feel like we’re living inside one giant Black Mirror bonus reel. Every year, every film festival, some poor distributor unveils yet another speculative-romance-dystopia hybrid, and we’re all supposed to nod thoughtfully and say, “Ah yes, what if love were controlled by science?” Or “What if a company could bottle up our feelings and sell them back to us?” And every year, I leave those screenings half-convinced I’ve seen the exact same movie before, just with different cheekbones and accents.

Apple TV+’s new entry, All of You, directed by William Bridges, is exactly that kind of déjà vu cinema. It’s a movie so self-consciously perched on the edge of sci-fi and romance that you can practically hear it whispering, “See? I’m profound. I’m about the future of human connection.” But beneath the fancy premise, it’s less “what if our souls could be matched by a machine” and more “what if two friends had unresolved feelings for each other across several awkward time jumps.” Spoiler: that’s not as thrilling as the setup makes it sound.

Still, there’s one saving grace here, and her name is Imogen Poots.

Let me explain why she carries this otherwise modest, occasionally frustrating film on her shoulders — and why Apple’s sleek, tech-friendly branding makes All of You feel less like a movie and more like a beautifully designed app you’ll download, use twice, and forget exists.

The Festival Curse

When All of You premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it got buried under shinier, weirder, louder movies. TIFF is notorious for that: if you’re not a prestige Oscar play or a viral word-of-mouth darling, you’re just background noise. By the time audiences walked out of screenings of The Assessment (what if the government chose whether you could have kids) or Daniela Forever (what if dream trials resurrected your ex), Bridges’ film already felt like it belonged in a bargain bin of speculative romance concepts.

This isn’t entirely Bridges’ fault. We’ve been drowning in these “sci-fi but make it sexy” experiments. The Pod Generation, Foe, Fingernails—all circling the same ideas about love, tech, and destiny, but rarely sticking the landing. It’s the cinematic version of déjà vu: the same ethical question asked in a different font. At some point, I stopped engaging with the moral dilemmas and just started judging who had the better lighting and wallpaper budget.

And in that sense, All of You has a glossy advantage. Apple’s brand is practically built on clean surfaces and cinematic sparseness. The film looks exactly like an Apple commercial: muted greys, chic apartments, gently futuristic London streets. It fits right in with Swan Song and Fingernails—quietly dystopian love stories that feel like someone turned a TED Talk into a drama.

Soulmates, Repackaged

Here’s the twist, though: Bridges has done this before. Literally. He co-created Soulmates, a one-season AMC series about a genetic test that could pair you with your perfect match. That show never really took off—partly because it treated its concept like a dating app pitch deck, partly because it didn’t know if it wanted to be anthology-style weird or sentimental love story.

And yet, instead of letting that idea die, Bridges just re-skinned it for All of You. Same company name, same test, same moral implications. It’s like a spin-off no one asked for. Watching the movie feels less like a bold new creation and more like a stubborn writer refusing to abandon his favorite high school essay topic.

But here’s the thing: maybe the recycled premise doesn’t matter as much as the execution. Because while All of You never delivers anything groundbreaking, it does manage to craft a surprisingly relatable romance, even if it’s wearing dystopian drag.

The Romance, Messy and Familiar

The story is deceptively simple: Laura (Imogen Poots) and Simon (Brett Goldstein, yes, Roy Kent himself) are college friends who find themselves tangled in the whole “Soul Connex” soulmate-testing craze. She’s curious, he’s skeptical. She takes the test anyway, he doesn’t. Flash forward a few years, and surprise—she finds her supposed perfect match. Meanwhile, Simon realizes he might have loved her all along.

Cue the slow-burn ache. Cue the flash-forwards. Cue the endless cycle of them drifting apart, finding new partners, then somehow orbiting back into each other’s lives like two satellites that can’t quite escape each other’s gravity.

On paper, this is catnip for hopeless romantics like me. I love a good messy relationship drama, especially one that skips around in time. Drake Doremus (Like Crazy, Equals, Zoe) practically built a career on this formula, and I’ve fallen for it before. That incremental heartbreak, the awkward silences, the subtle “what if” that lingers between two people—it can feel devastating when done right.

And occasionally, All of You nails that vibe. Each time we jump forward, there’s a little disorientation—who’s dating who, who’s angry, who’s content—and it mirrors the way memory works. You don’t recall every second of a relationship, just the big chapters and the gut punches. Watching Laura and Simon stumble through years of almost-love is like thumbing through an old photo album, realizing how much you’ve forgotten but also how much still stings.

Imogen Poots, the Real MVP

None of this would work without Poots. She has this natural, unforced charisma that makes Laura believable even when the script underserves her. One minute she’s bantering with Goldstein in a way that feels genuinely flirty and lived-in, the next she’s crumbling under the weight of her choices. There’s a scene where she quietly breaks down after realizing her soulmate marriage isn’t as clean-cut as she’d hoped, and it hits harder than any of the sci-fi gimmicks.

It’s funny, because Poots has always been hovering on the edge of stardom without ever quite getting the mainstream push. She’s too indie to be a blockbuster lead, too unpredictable to be pigeonholed. But here, she proves she could absolutely carry a rom-com—or a messy prestige romance—if Hollywood would just let her.

Goldstein, on the other hand, is… fine. He’s got the gruff charm we all know from Ted Lasso, but in All of You, it feels dialed down. He never quite matches Poots’ emotional depth, which leaves the film a little lopsided. Their chemistry works in moments, but too often, he feels like he’s holding back while she’s going full throttle.

The Sci-Fi That Isn’t Really Sci-Fi

And here’s where the film either charms you or loses you: the sci-fi concept is barely there. Yes, there’s a soulmate test. Yes, we get eerie Soul Connex ads plastered across London, a little too close to real-world AI billboards and Ozempic posters. But beyond some dinner table debates about whether science should dictate love, the film doesn’t really interrogate its premise.

It’s just window dressing. A slightly heightened metaphor for the excuses we all make in relationships. In Laura’s case, it’s not “I can’t be with you because I’m married” but “I can’t be with you because the test says this other guy is my soulmate.” Same difference, but with a glossy sci-fi bow on top.

And honestly? That works better than I expected. By keeping the tech in the background, Bridges sidesteps the trap of overexplaining. The future here looks eerily familiar, which makes the story sting a little more. We’re only a couple of bad apps away from living this reality ourselves.

Final Thoughts

So where does that leave us? With a film that’s fine. Better than some of its copycat peers, carried almost entirely by Imogen Poots, but still a little too safe to matter. All of You wants to be Like Crazy meets Black Mirror, but it never fully embraces either the swoon or the darkness. It’s watchable, sometimes touching, occasionally frustrating, and ultimately destined to be “that Apple TV+ romance you vaguely remember.”