Can science help us find a soulmate? We still don’t know, but the movie "All of You" on AppleTV+ tries to give an answer
In the world, everything changes, yet one thing seems identical and immutable: the difficulty of finding love. While progress is made in many aspects of daily life, though less so in politics and society, the undeniable truth is that the growing pervasiveness of technology has made everyday tasks easier. All except one: knowing for sure whether the person beside us truly is our soulmate. Cinema knows this and tries to remedy it. The results, however, are not always what we imagined, or even wanted. That happened in 2023 when Greek director Christos Nikou released Fingernails – A Diagnosis of Love. And it happens again in 2025 on AppleTV+ with All of You, directed by William Bridges, who also co-wrote the screenplay with leading actor Brett Goldstein. In Fingernails, characters live in a future much like ours, where a machine that analyzes your fingernails reveals the probability of success in a relationship. Something similar occurs in All of You, though the story dives even deeper.
From Fingernails to All of You: the obsession with soulmates
In this film with Goldstein and co-star Imogen Poots, set in a future that already feels like the present, people can take a test that reveals their one true half. No percentages or probabilities, just the exact person they are destined to spend their life with. For Bridges, telling stories about soulmates seems almost a mission. He had already done so in 2020 with the TV series Soulmates, co-written with Goldstein. Even the fictional company that provides the test, Soul Connex, makes a return. In the series, characters wrestled with the cost of finding true love. In All of You, the parameters are reversed: the challenge isn’t discovering who your soulmate is, but convincing yourself of it. A theme dear to Goldstein (from Ted Lasso) and Bridges (writer of Black Mirror and contributor to Stranger Things) since 2013, when they co-created the short film For Life. That project now serves as the narrative seed for All of You, suggesting that Bridges and Goldstein may be each other’s creative soulmates.
Friendship, love, and missed opportunities
In the movie, Simon (Goldstein) and Laura (Poots) have always been friends. As in For Life, Simon accompanies Laura to take the test and discover her “person,” hoping to avoid another heartbreak like her last relationship. Simon himself doesn’t believe this is the right way to find love, and perhaps secretly hopes he’ll be her result. But destiny has other plans. For years, Laura and Simon will remain caught between friendship, sparks, and regrets, revealing their true feelings when it may already be too late. Intimate and natural, All of You flows like real life, where it’s up to the viewer to connect the dots through time jumps. The film doesn’t provide a definitive answer about finding a soulmate. It’s melancholic and moving, but ultimately unresolved, just like its protagonists. Like Fingernails, and as always in stories that seek to define who we’re meant to love, it highlights not just the limits of science, but also those of human nature: the difficulty of communicating, opening up, and being vulnerable. And, conversely, the ease of drowning in doubts, doubts we often hand over to science in the hope of solving them, only to multiply them.
What All of You on AppleTV+ teaches about love
If both Nikou’s and Bridges’ works strike at the heart, it’s because they expose all the wonders, and contradictions, of free will. Why am I destined for this person? Who decided it? Was it science? But is science always right, or are feelings stronger? In both stories, choice is the driving force, even when it leaves characters paralyzed by fear of their emotions. Taking the test may be the simplest path, but is it the right one? By examining the many forms of love, whether or not they align with the idea of a soulmate, All of You on AppleTV+ delivers a familiar reminder from cinema: don’t fear not finding your other half, sometimes, the key is to let them go. In Italy, the release coincides with Together by Michael Shanks, another story that mirrors these themes. Here, surrendering to another person could be the true key to “happily ever after”, albeit with a horror twist.
