For better or worse, Brett Goldstein is always — or at least for the far foreseeable future — going to be associated with his Ted Lasso character, Roy Kent. As Kent, he was grumpy, hot-headed, and, while time ultimately demonstrated his softer side, an overall rough personality. At 45 years old, the actor/comedian/writer/podcaster has a padded body of work, but as these things go, for most viewers it will remain hard to separate Goldstein from his cantankerous Kent (especially with another season of Ted Lasso in the works, God help us all).
Perhaps his best bet to shed that character, then, is to wrest back control and write one himself. Goldstein, along with director William Bridges, wrote All of You, a broadly sci-fi take on forbidden love. In the film, Simon (Goldstein) has been in love with his uni friend Laura (Imogen Poots) for years, but has never made his feelings known. When Laura decides to take “The Test,” a simple test that reveals your soulmate, Simon even helps her pay for it. Predictably, the result isn’t Simon but instead Lukas (Steven Cree), with whom Laura falls madly in love and marries. Simon subsequently makes attempts at relationships, but it’s clear that no one will ever live up to Laura. After her father dies, Laura shows up at Simon’s apartment in the middle of the night, where they have sex on his floor, before she leaves without a word. For the rest of the film, the two have an on-again, off-again affair, forever muddied by the fact that Simon believes Laura is his soulmate, but Laura knows, because of the test, that Simon isn’t hers.
In interviews, Goldstein has called the film his “baby” and revealed that he and Bridges worked on it for more than 10 years, and that devoted emphasis on story is clear. Each section is carefully crafted, existing not just merely to advance the plot toward some inevitable end, but constructed so that viewers are able to sit with these characters and get to know them intimately, flaws and all. On the surface, Simon appears to be quite a divergence from characters like Roy Kent. He’s sarcastic, sure, and unwilling to talk about his feelings, but while it took a long time for Kent’s true, softer nature to show, we see Simon’s tender love for Laura from the very beginning. Poots is also fully dialed in as Laura, presenting the mature, deeply complicated love that exists between these two people in an honest and refreshing way; there is no glory in love, after all, something All of You understands and underlines with authenticity. The film also takes care to not only highlight either the picturesque and passion-fueled moments of a love affair: we also see Laura’s psychological struggles with cheating on her husband and her fear of abandoning her child, while Simon must contend with the fact that an affair is all this relationship will ever be.
But while the exceptional lead performances are certainly necessary in guiding the film toward its primary concerns, what’s most provocative in All of You is its measured and nuanced approach to depicting a capital-A affair, excavating all of the difficult, sometimes unparsable feelings that envelop the circumstance, and avoiding ever registering as either an afterschool special on the ills of cheating or a treatise on true love. Much of the conflict between Simon and Laura stems from the fact that Laura is married, and specifically what feelings arise in her because of their situationship, but importantly the film never crosses a line into any kind of moral imperative, instead allowing all conflict to arise organically and realistically from the interior of its complex characters. This also lends new weight to the film’s slight sci-fi bent, as “The Test” becomes less of a narrative shortcut and more of a thorny discursive avenue, interrogating not only the possibility of a soulmate, but also the question of their potential limitations if they were in fact to exist. Is the one even enough?
All of You isn’t without its dose of rom-com clichés, and the peripheral relationships depicted are given little screentime and less consideration. That lack of a comparative benchmark can let some air out of the essential drama of the conceit, limiting our ability to understand what a traditional relationship might look like for these two. But the film’s bittersweet, deeply human conclusion reclaims much of the earned goodwill in its refusal to put a pretty bow on things. Goldstein and Bridges have crafted a genuinely engaging and intelligent romance, one that mostly resists templatizing its story and instead feels written by real humans about real humans — a rare, refreshing feat in the landscape of 2025 cinema.
DIRECTOR: William Bridges; CAST: Brett Goldstein, Imogen Poots, Steven Cree, Zawe Ashton; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; IN THEATERS: September 19; STREAMING: September 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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