You can tell a lot about two people if you watch them sit together in silence: where their eyes go, how their bodies move, the way the quiet hangs in the air. In “All of You,” Simon (Brett Goldstein) and Laura (Imogen Poots) do a lot of this kind of sitting. For a commercial romantic drama, it is strikingly open to allowing moments in between conversation to linger, brief naturalistic spaces where we might intuit the shared weight of their connection.
Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, “All of You” is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full and well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair, naturally emanating the history and easy chemistry of best friends who never got together, then navigating, hand-in-hand, the thornier path of lovers we believe in but maybe shouldn’t.
Directed by William Bridges (who wrote the film with Goldstein), the movie takes place in a near-future that has developed The Test, a technology that determines, empirically, who people’s soul mates are. Simon isn’t a fan, but is willing to pay for Laura to take her test. Her soul mate, unsurprisingly, is not Simon.
This speculative structure — a story about love in the age of artificial intelligence — is mostly a gimmicky red herring, a side plot to Simon and Laura’s deep connection across time. The movie frequently skips ahead, through relationships and major life changes, with Simon and Laura dancing around each other throughout. In each periodic pit stop, Goldstein and Poots are left to translate what’s changed, and the longing that has persisted. They do it mightily well.
Goldstein’s quick charms carry banter that might otherwise land flat, and he bears an unselfconscious softness that draws you in as it splinters his seemingly unflinching exterior. But it’s really Poots who is the star. She possesses a grounded magnetism that never veers into the cliché quirkiness (or, in more recent years, the steely snark) that blights so many romantic characters. More important, Poots’s quiet embodiment of inner turmoil traces the sense of time and age that powers the film’s emotional wallop.
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