Everything Everywhere All at Once Review: Turn Up for the Multiverse

The film works magic by embracing excess, finding a kind of harmony and possibility within it.

Everything Everywhere All at Once
Photo: Allyson Riggs/A24

Much of the joy of Everything Everywhere All at Once lies in the sheer inventiveness with which Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert organize their gonzo ideas into a cohesive whole. Throughout the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, the directing duo known as Daniels put their down-and-out protagonist, a frazzled, overworked Chinese immigrant named Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), through an existential ringer that’s every bit as exhausting as it is thrillingly alive with possibility.

Across a series of connecting universes, Evelyn will not only peer into the lives of the Evelyns that could have been, but also absorb their powers to save reality itself. We will see her as a chef, a kung-fu star, and an ordinary woman in a realm where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. In another universe, we even see her as a rock with googly eyes—a humorous sight gag that gives way to a surprisingly profound and moving conversation between Evelyn and her also-a-rock daughter that plays out in complete silence but is translated by subtitles.

But first, we will see Evelyn as she really is, and in what may be the ultimate realm of the mundane: an Internal Revenue Service office. Sitting across from Evelyn is Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), a straight-laced I.R.S. agent who explains to her in punishingly exacting detail what’s wrong with the documents that she’s submitted with her taxes.

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Evelyn is followed by disappointment and carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her ailing father, Gong Gong (James Hong), who forbade her from emigrating to America, sees her as a failure. Her marriage to the amicable but dull Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is on the brink of collapse, as is their laundromat business. And her fractured relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is seemingly beyond repair, as signaled by her inability to introduce Joy’s partner, Becky (Tallie Medel), to her father as anything more than a “good friend.”

Such quotidian struggles may be common to immigrant stories, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is no common immigrant story. When Waymond—or rather, a Waymond from another universe—contacts Evelyn, telling her that he needs her help to defeat the evil Jobu Tupaki, a woman seeking to destroy the multiverse, the film explodes into a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of visual delights, full of increasingly bizarre narrative diversions. And much of this takes place within the corridors and cubicles of the I.R.S. office, which functions as a surrealistic battleground in which Kwan and Scheinert stage a series of innovative action scenes that put to shame almost anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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As Evelyn learns how to access the skills and talents of her other selves from throughout the multiverse—using a technique called “verse-jumping”—Daniels’s feverish mélange of ideas, genres, tones, and emotions pushes the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking. As one may expect from the directors of Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once doesn’t lack for absurdity, which extends to everything from the verse-jumping, which requires increasingly silly acts to initiate, to the film’s numerous fight scenes.

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Each of those action set pieces, elegantly and humorously choreographed by Andy and Brian Le, recall everything from The Matrix and The Legend of Drunken Master to old Looney Tunes cartoons, yet they offer something truly fresh and unexpected with seemingly every punch or kick that is thrown. An early scene where Waymond wields his fanny pack against an onslaught of I.R.S. security guards seems downright ordinary in light of Evelyn later taking on a pants-less villain wearing a butt plug or fighting another baddie, Big Nose (Jenny Slate), whose savage use of her leashed Pomeranian tests the true power of the dog.

That all this only scratches the surface of the boldly imaginative twists and turns that Everything Everywhere All at Once takes throughout its runtime may indicate that this is an unwieldy film interested far less in its characters than in throwing an array of stunts, jokes, and ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Fortunately, there’s a method to Daniels’s madness, even if it takes a while for that to become clear. And thanks to a truly remarkable turn from Yeoh, who rises to the challenge of constantly switching emotional registers on a dime, the filmmakers construct a rich emotional tapestry from deep within the fray.

For all its chaotic collages of images and ideas, Everything Everywhere All at Once is, at its core, a coherent depiction of a family learning to stay whole in an overstimulated, hyperactive world that trafficks in distractions far more effectively than it invites love and understanding. In yet another delightfully ludicrous turn, an everything bagel—and, in this case, “everything” in the truly literal sense—is revealed to be a portal into oblivion, which the miserable Joy sees as the only escape from her relentless anxiety and depression.

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Evelyn and Joy’s relationship provides the film with some genuine emotional heft, while allowing the film’s ceaseless barrage of insane ideas to take on a new, and deeper, meaning when mirroring the symptoms of an anxiety-ridden mind living in our hyper-modern world. As Evelyn says at one point, the expanding glut of information that’s thrown at us on a daily basis can make us feel like “little pieces of shit.” But Everything Everywhere All at Once works magic by embracing that excess, finding a kind of harmony and possibility within it, and reminding us of the beauty and lunacy of the human experience along the way.

Score: 
 Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., Biff Wiff  Director: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert  Screenwriter: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 140 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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