There are movies where the creative energy is so bonkers, so high on its own imagination, that you find yourself hanging on by your fingernails. This can be a good thing, like Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or more recently, Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You. It can also be a not-so-good thing: Cloud Atlas (2012) and Jupiter Ascending (2015) are examples of outlandish sci-fi fantasies that topple over like a wedding cake with too much frosting. Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the good ones—a deliriously over-the-top, multiverse-hopping, genre-bending movie that unapologetically pushes itself to the limit.
On its surface, Everything Everywhere All at Once is about a woman just trying to do her taxes. When we first meet harried, unlikely, and unwilling hero Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), she is literally buried under the weight of her responsibilities: Stacks of business receipts cover her dining table as she prepares for her meeting with the Internal Revenue Service. Her laundromat is being audited, and it doesn’t look good.
But by the end of the film’s first act, it looks even worse. Swaying as she addresses the logistics of her father’s (James Hong) birthday celebration, Evelyn is facing what appears to be imminent ruin: An IRS agent and the police are about to repossess her business; her naive, kind-to-a-fault husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) has filed for divorce; and her queer, Americanized daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) wants to introduce her girlfriend to her stern, unforgiving grandfather. As she sits in the meeting with a snooty IRS agent (Jaime Lee Curtis), Yeoh brings a bitter weariness to this invisible woman who looks out at the wreckage of her life and wonders what could have been.
Then it all kicks off.
Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—professionally known as the directing duo The Daniels—are sticklers for details. In a superbly edited and choreographed opening sequence, the Daniels map the sprawling yet claustrophobic confines of the Wangs’ apartment-slash-laundromat—a boundaryless space that’s become more of a prison than a sanctuary, and whose future is very much at stake. They could be crafting a credible, realist drama about the high cost of living in contemporary America and the intergenerational anxieties of assimilated families; but this is much more wild. And more fun.
On the elevator up to the IRS lady, Waymond is suddenly possessed by a different Waymond—one from an alternate timeline where they’ve learned how to jump from one parallel universe to another. In that universe, Evelyn is a pioneering scientist who has accidentally unleashed a force that may end reality as we know it, and Waymond 2.0 has been searching all the infinite multiverses for an Evelyn who can make things right. It’s the Butterfly Effect run amok: There are as many alternate timelines—as many different “you”s—as there are decision-forks in a person’s life. In one of them, Evelyn is a master chef. In another, everyone has hot dogs for fingers. In a third, she’s a glamorous star of martial arts movie extravaganzas—she’s, you know, Michelle Yeoh, basically. But why would Waymond 2.0 pick this particular Evelyn—a failed Evelyn—to save the universe? He figures her life can’t get any worse, and that being great at absolutely nothing will make her great at borrowing the talents of the infinite Evelyns.
The film explodes with style and content. As advertised, the Daniels throw all at their disposal into the mix: Sentient rocks, talking raccoons, butt plugs, sausage fingers, mother love. The film is, quite literally, a giant everything bagel. This is a film made by movie lovers, for movie lovers. Snapping in bursts from universe to universe, Everything Everywhere All at Once constantly courts sensory overload, lining up the edges of surreal domestic scenes and wuxia fights and a Wong Kar-wai street-scene homage and the windowless confines of the IRS, and moving between them erratically and seamlessly. It’s Ratatouille, In The Mood For Love, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon all in the same movie.
But at its core, Everything Everywhere All at Once is an incredibly unpretentious meaning-of-life movie. For all its own garbled mythology, which it doesn’t take especially seriously, always at the center are the Wangs and the hurt they keep doing to one another in the name of love. And it stresses that, through it all, love and family are the true meaning of life. It’s a story of disappointment and miscommunication and the burden of expectations across generations, and the Daniels have managed to take an intimate family drama and roll it around in glitter while still keeping its heart. The most emotionally powerful line in the film is delivered at the end, when Evelyn says to her daughter—a mother-daughter relationship that is situationally fractured— “There is no place, in the entire universe, that I’d rather be than right here with you.” Excuse me while I shed a tear.
It’s a euphoric showcase for Yeoh, bringing the superstar down to earth and then flinging her back into space, but it’s also a poignant return to the screen for former child star Quan, who as Waymond is the tender heart of the film, as well as someone who can use a fanny pack as a rope dart in combat. Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first.