There’s something about Laura Sharp and Simon Tavistock. Close friends since college, they share jokes that no one else understands and instinctively know how to make the other feel better.
“What’s the deal with you two?” a woman asks Simon after watching them interact. “We’re like BFFs,” he responds, which is true and also not completely true. What if these BFFs were really meant to be lovers?
“All of You” from Apple TV+ walks carefully into this age-old premise, sweetly and with more honesty than typical Hollywood fare. It’s messy and romantic and both deeply sad and deeply soulful.
Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots star in this very British drama-rom-com that asks questions about destiny, regret and happily-ever-after love. Goldstein, the gruff “Ted Lasso” star, is slightly less gruff here, but pulls off the yearning. Poots is revelatory — girlish one moment, anguished the next.
Written by Goldstein and William Bridges, “All of You” starts with Poots’ Laura signing up to take a compatibility test that will find her soulmate. Goldstein’s Simon accompanies her, worried that she’ll find true love and then immediately start ignoring her friends. “It’ll be the end of everything,” he moans.
She does find her soulmate and he’s really perfect — but he’s not Simon. He’s another guy (Steven Cree), a sweetheart who becomes her husband and with whom they have a daughter. He’s almost cartoonishly good. “His very existence makes me feel guilty,” she admits.
In turns out there is indeed something about Laura Sharp and Simon Tavistock. And one day they can’t deny it to each other.
An affair — in fits and starts, admittedly, with some panic attacks thrown in — begins. Cue montage of walks through fields holding hands and steamy sex. It goes on for years until it isn’t enough for Simon. “All I want is to be with you through all of it,” he tells her. “I don’t know how to love anyone else.”
Bridges, who also directs, has a loose hand, letting scenes breathe in silence and allowing the actors to sneak meaningful glances at each other. Transitions between scenes are excellent — a car door closes in the darkness and another opens in daylight. But it’s not always clear how much time has passed between the moments. Is it the next day? Or four years?
“All of You” is a sort of second stab at this story, which Goldstein and Bridges (“Black Mirror”) first explored in the canceled-too-soon AMC anthology series “Soulmates.” Fittingly for a story about second chances, this time it sticks.
We’re rooting for this star-crossed couple even though the ache they will leave behind is palpable. There is this overwhelming lustful urge but also responsibilities, the heart versus the head. “We hurt people and they don’t even know that we’re doing it to them,” Laura says. To make it all hurt the more, Laura is held up as a reason the soulmate test works.
Goldstein makes a good stab and showing he can be a leading man — and also write a gentle, human romance — and Poots is a revelation in showing raw emotion. The two have a natural chemistry tied by his humor and her laughter is genuine and touching.
There are funny bits, to be sure, but our advice is to have a box of tissues on hand. Someone onscreen is going to get really badly hurt by the end and be in tears — and likely so will you.
“All of You,” an Apple TV+ release that hits the streamer Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for sexual content/some nudity, language and brief drug use. Running time: 99 minutes. Three stars out of four.
