(courtesy IMP Awards)
Knowledge, especially when it’s anchored in scientific truth, is a good and powerful thing.
Though there are far too many in the world today who believe that facts are situational and malleable and able to bent at will to suit whatever purpose you have in mind, the fact of the matter is that scientific knowledge gives us a surety and a sense of the world that helps us to make sense of a great many things.
One of the things it may have robbed us of however is a sense of accidental wonder; that delicious feeling that comes from diving into a situation or experiencing something without any warning of what lies in wait nor what form it will take.
That makes life scarily uncertain at times, true, but oh how wondrous it is when the unexpected turns out to be delight and a joy and we had no idea it was coming; it just is, is with us and is ours and we had no idea it was coming at all.
In All of You, science has delivered up what a lot of people crave – certainty that the person you commit to spending your life with is absolutely and irrefutably your soulmate, the one you are destined to be with and the only one who will truly make you happy.
That’s at least what the test from a company called Soul Connex promises – open up your heart, soul and mind to them and in return they will turn something that is intangible and unknowable in lots of ways, the act of falling in love, or at least trying to find romance, and make it something as well defined and knowable as what temperature boils at or how penicillin can heal you.
If you’re someone ill at ease with the many unknown facets of life, which is more prone to shadows and half-shaded truths than well lit corridors of knowability, and there are many of us out there – though this reviewer, now freed from the confining dogma of religion, is happier with the bloodied loose ends of life these days than anything else – then you will well understand why so many people in the near-future world of All of You are eager to take the test, find their soulmate and be done with the messy business of falling in love the old-fashioned way.
One of those people is Laura (Imogen Poots) who wants to find her man and be done with it.
She gets a loan from her best friend since college Simon (Ted Lasso‘s Brett Goldstein, who co-wrote the screenplay with director William Bridges) who is deeply and forever in love with her but who cannot bring himself to tell her for reasons likely he can’t even fully articulate.
So, Laura takes the test, is matched with Glasgow resident Lukas (Steven Cree) and embarks on a life of domestic bliss, getting married, having a daughter and establishing a career, confident that, romance wise at least, she has got everything knowably and certainly under control.
But here’s where things get interesting and where All of You makes an empathetically solid case for the fact that while science may be able to do many things, it cannot really explain the depths and unknown reaches of the human soul.
While Laura does love Lukas, you spend much of All of You, which takes places over a great many years where Simon and Laura stay in contact but only just until they embark ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- on a extensive, wide-ranging affair, it soon becomes clear that her heart is, and will always be, beyond all others, with Simon.
There is an ease of relating and a truthfulness between the two that transcends all other relationships in their lives, and though Laura convinces herself she loves Lukas, and likely does in a way that suits her later shaky belief in the godlike scientific trappings of Soul Connex’s test, and Simon tries to date other people including Laura’s friend Andrea (Zawe Ashton), they always come back to each other.
As sure as night follows day, and reconciliation follows some virulently argumentative falling-outs, Laura and Simon belong together and it’s something they will never be able to disavow.
But here’s where things get truly interesting and why All of You is such a standout, deeply moving film.
Despite the near-irresistible connection between Simon and Laura, and the sense that they belong together no matter the damage wrought ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- does not even remotely go down the path you expect.
While there was no doubt some temptation to Hollywood-ise the ending and serve up a story in which love conquers all, the script by Bridges and Goldstein is too well grounded in the truths of life and the contradictions of the human condition to go with so simplistic at outcome.
A thousand rom-coms have it is true, and in movies like Sleepless in Seattle, the man or woman of the picture is sacrificed on the altar of true love and the two protagonists, thought responsible for some short-term angst and suffering, set off into the sunset confident that true love is well and truly on their side, and justifies all.
But All of You doesn’t heed the cosy call of the usual rom-com ending, and instead asks us to consider what would happen if we looked hard at love, true love, which Simon and Laura have in spades and apologised, with great regret and broken heart, and said you must honour the life to which you have committed yourself.
Now you could well argue that by having an affair, Laura in particular has already shat upon her holy vows from a great and slowly destructive height, and it’s true that Simon and Laura do some pretty impressive corrosive damage out of sight and mind as they follow their hearts.
But in the end a nuanced and painfully, emotionally thoughtful All of You ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- forsakes love, at least as Simon and Laura know it and opts instead for the fact that though the heart wants what heart wants, some love stories never follow their expected course and we must live with that, desperately bittersweet though it may be.