Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the increasingly popular multiverse premise explored in superhero fiction like Spider-Man: No Way Home. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and The Flash, and creates a whole new niche for itself. It marries bizarre comedy, stellar action, and heartfelt emotions in a film that’s both heady and blisteringly fast-paced.
Aging laundromat owner Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is living a tedious, unfulfilled life with meek, but positive husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, who makes his return to acting four decades after appearing in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), dealing with the burden of unmet expectations from her father, Gong Gong (James Hong), and also ignoring her daughter, Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) girlfriend along with the fact that she’s gay in the first place.
Things come to a head when Evelyn goes to the IRS along with her husband and father, and an alternate universe version of her husband takes control of her body and tasks her with taking the responsibility of saving the multiverse from Jobu Tupaki, an absurdly powerful verse-jumper whose consciousness is split across the multiverse.
You would think that the best things about Everything Everywhere All at Once would be its action sequences and the universe-jumping where we get to see different takes on the same characters. And while those aspects of the movie are very good, it’s really the unconventional humor and family drama at the heart of the movie that make it as great as it is. Verse-jumpers have to do statistically-improbable things to gain access to their alternate selves’ memories and skills, such as eating chapstick or lodging awards that are shaped suspiciously similar to buttplugs up their butts. There’s a universe where everyone’s hands have hotdog-like fingers, which is explained via a glorious riff on the classic apes’ scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And then there’s a universe where life never evolved, so Evelyn takes the form of a rock.
The story is intrinsically tied to the family dynamics between the Wangs. Evelyn is the only one who can defeat Jobu Tupaki because she’s the most unfulfilled Evelyn in all of existence, so she has the most untapped potential. Every universe is meaningful because it represents one of the forks in the road where Evelyn took a different decision. Jobu Tupaki, on the other hand, believes that everything is meaningless, and is looking for a way out, as well as someone who can understand her. Directed by the Daniels, who also directed the hilarious Swiss Army Man, this feels like a perfect storm of ingredients that will probably not be replicated again.
Michelle Yeoh is tailor-made for the role of Evelyn. She gets to stretch all of her acting and action muscles, delivering perhaps her career-best performance.
Everyone else in the main cast, including Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, and James Hong also deliver great performances. Most importantly, they seem to be having a lot of fun!
Everything Everywhere All at Once may not be everyone’s cup of tea due to its hectic pacing and slightly messy storytelling. But if you manage to stick with it, you may just walk away with one of the most rewarding cinematic experiences of the last few years. At this point, it looks likely to become a cult classic, as it has a very small theater distribution run. Thankfully, it seems to be on track to make back its budget.