Everything Everywhere All At Once: A Frenetic Thrill-Ride Through the Multiverse

At some point during Everything Everywhere All At Once, Daniels‘ Kwan and Scheinert‘s brilliantly bonkers multiverse epic, our heroine Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) lies bloody and exhausted on the ground. She is utterly spent and after being coerced to continue, mutters “how am I going to explain all this?”

She may as well have been the journalist tasked with reviewing this movie. For Everything Everywhere All At Once is truly a Russian doll – almost to a literal degree: each layer lying underneath the outer one reveals more and more about this fantastical world and how it works, but it also defies description or explanation. Instead, it is simply a movie to experience on its own terms. Like being strapped to a rocket and propelled into the heavens, you can’t stop it or control it, you just have to go with it. You’ll likely finish this experience feeling a little dizzy, exhilarated, elated and with a newfound perspective as your mind buzzes over all of the information. It will take a few days to process.

It is strange now to think that the roaring hype beast threatened to swallow this movie whole, after word-of-mouth spread like wildfire and one began to think it could not possibly live up to those expectations; however, it happily confirms all of those early ravings and, what’s more, proves that one thing about this movie is not hyperbole: you’ve certainly never seen something like this before.

Death & Taxes

In an effort to keep the story from leaking, Kwan and Scheinert (collectively called Daniels) described the movie as “a woman trying to do her taxes”. This is the outermost layer of the Russian doll. Evelyn is a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a struggling laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, perhaps better known as either Short Round from Temple of Doom or Data from Goonies, take your pick). She is on the verge of an existential crisis, questioning the humdrum life she chose and too busy trying to make ends meet to connect with her wayward daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). She is also behind on her taxes, and desperately needs to find a way out of her financial situation. Evelyn’s plight is an all-too-familiar one. She exemplifies the overwhelming monotony of life, the need to fill a hundred different roles at any given time: wife, mother, daughter, business owner. The necessity placed on her to be everything everywhere all at once buries her; she has become trapped under the weight of reality, struggling to accept that she must let go of the hopes and dreams she carries and fill out tax return forms she barely understands.

This particular layer of the Russian doll is established in the opening scene; a chaotic, rambling cacophony of half-conversations and anxiety-inducing melodrama. It plays like a Safdie movie to start, rollicking along at a brisk pace, barely giving you a moment to digest what’s happening. Don’t be fooled, though. Later on, you’ll look back at this and see it for the Sunday morning stroll-in-the-park that it is compared to madcap adventures to come.

Everything Everywhere All At Once could have simply been this movie, this outer layer, and it may have been compelling enough. But then comes the second layer of the doll. A word, though, before you continue: while nothing in the ensuing paragraphs will contain plot spoilers per se, it is highly recommended to go into Everything Everywhere All At Once blind. This is a movie that rewards genuine discovery without the added expectation of what’s to come or the knowledge of plot beats that might point you in the direction the movie will go. It is the joy of newness, of something honest-to-God fresh, that initially invigorates.

The second layer of the Russian doll is instigated by Waymond, who informs Evelyn he is from the Alphaverse and is able to take over the minds of his counterparts in various different universes. For every decision you make or don’t make, Waymond explains, another universe is created. There are literally millions of these. He equips Evelyn with a device that will help her “Verse-Jump” into different versions of herself so that she may gain the skills she needs to fight the ominous Jobu Tupaki, an “agent of pure chaos” who is determined to destroy the world unless Evelyn stops it.

Verse-Jumping

Queue the beginning of pure, uncut pandemonium as Evelyn Verse-Jumps into multiple different versions of herself, witnessing the lives she could have lived if she made different decisions: a blind singer, a chef, an action movie star, a woman with hotdogs for fingers (no, really). Queue a delirious smorgasbord of references, from Pixar’s Ratatouille to Wong Kar-wai‘s In The Mood For Love; from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix; from Super Mario to Sherlock Jr. It all races past in the blink of an eye and threatens to leave you behind if you so much as glance down at your popcorn. A note Evelyn receives from Waymond before she starts her multiverse journey reads: Don’t forget to breathe. The audience would be minded to heed those words too.

True to its title, Everything Everywhere All At Once really does offer that very thing: it is at times every genre, it will evoke every emotion, and it will provide a little bit of something for everyone, even if those moments are fleeting. It is a carnival of constant motion, a speed train shuttering to its apex, throwing everything it can think of at the viewer. Incredibly, it doesn’t lose itself under the weight of its ambitions. The third layer of the Russian doll finds a beautiful thread of meaning: that in each universe, each life she lives, Evelyn can find purpose and peace, should she choose to. Waymond tells her his style of fighting is to see the good side of things. “I’m not being naïve”, he tells a cynical Evelyn, “it is strategic and necessary. It’s how I learned to survive”. It’s this layer that is perhaps the heart of the existential dread Everything Everywhere All At Once presents, a simple message of love and acceptance, of seeing the good in everyone when it’s much easier to see the bad, that feels essential for our times.

It is also masterfully performed: Hsu is standout as the eclectic Joy, a young woman who wants acceptance and love from her mother, and who has an astonishing range of emotions and attitudes. Hsu handles the enormous task of representing the multi(world)faceted Joy with aplomb. She is, quite simply, a revelation. Elsewhere Quan as Waymond is also incredible, oscillating between the meek Waymond of Evelyn’s world, and the confident Waymond of the Alphaverse who must guide Evelyn through this carnage. There are simple moves such as placing his head in his hands that turn into bookends for transitions between the two Waymonds and happen so effectively and masterfully as to be borderline shocking when it happens. Jamie-Lee Curtis also makes an appearance as a stoic, no-nonsense tax officer and it is clear she is relishing the role.

None of this is to take away from Yeoh who is, as always, brilliant.  Yeoh can seemingly turn any part into something tangible and relatable but here she has the role of a lifetime in the conflicted, confused Evelyn. In every scene she’s in Evelyn is hilariously out of her depth and trying to make sense of everything. In later scenes, she is calm and confident and Yeoh brings the viewer into her world, showing us Evelyn’s acceptance of life and newfound perspective.

Another layer of the doll is in how incredibly funny Everything Everywhere All At Once is, and how it utilises the most insane, bat-shit concepts to mine comedy and pathos. You’ll find yourself in tears at a shot of rock with googly eyes, you’ll scream in laughter when a man launches himself ass-first onto a phallic object to instigate a fight, and you’ll consider the meaning of the infinite cosmos through the concept of a bagel. It is a kind of gonzo style that has no right to work this well or be this funny and touching, all at the same time. That it manages all of this is a testament to every aspect of production, not least the editing team who must surely have gone for a drink by the end of the job. Were there any justice in the world they would create an entirely new editing category simply to award this movie.

Conclusion

Bonkers, gonzo fun meets genuinely empathic, resonant meaning. Everything Everywhere All At Once won’t be for everyone; for some its breakneck speed and refusal to adhere to a common form of filmmaking may be too much, for others its truly offbeat comedic style might be a turnoff. Those who do enjoy its delightfully unhinged cinematic style, its unabashed love of pop culture references, and its wild, multi-layered bacchanalian wonder, will likely proclaim this one of the best movies of the year. Just remember to breathe!

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a career highlight for Michelle Yeoh. What are your favorite of her performances? Let us know in the comments!

Everything Everywhere All At Once is now in cinemas

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