You know that feeling you get after you see what has instantly become one of your new favorite movies? Even though the theater lights have brightened a bit, you don’t want to leave just yet. The credits are rolling, but you can’t move as if you are glued to your seat. The goosebumps and palpable excitement have not left your body yet. Still misty-eyed, your salty tears are stained on your cheek.
To say that Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” meets the bare minimum of being one of my new favorite films is a profound understatement. Unabashedly weird, extraordinary and breathtakingly imaginative, this multiversal story about the strength of familial love and the “too-muchness” of existential despair left me in absolute awe. Featuring hot dog fingers and sex toy fight scenes, this film is an acid drop of stoner movie heaven and Hong Kong action cinema that explodes right off the screen with endless emotional depth which simply cannot be summed up in this measly Reveille review.
Directed by duo collectively known as Daniels of “Swiss Army Man” fame, this new A24 picture follows Chinese immigrant and failing laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, played by the miraculous Michelle Yeoh, who finds herself caught up as the reluctant Chosen One to save the multiverse from an all-encompassing black hole. With the newfound power of connecting with different versions of herself, Evelyn can harness their abilities of martial arts, dancing, hibachi chef skills or being a movie star.
But Evelyn is way too busy to save the world today. Already under an IRS audit by Jaime Lee Curtis’ character, she is overwhelmed and struggling to maintain a steady relationship with her earnest husband (a scene-stealing Ke Huy), openly gay daughter (Stephanie Hsu) and aging father (James Gong) who views her as a disappointment. Everything is happening to her everywhere all at once.
With the title serving as the film’s thesis, the story reads almost like a period piece for 2022 in that all its characters are plagued with the constant strain of feeling confused, lost in humdrum of existence and unsure if linear time is real. Despite its exuberant goofiness, “Everything Everywhere” feels universally relatable in the era of Zoom classes, busy work and the sweeping blanket of the loudness and banality of the universe.
Yeoh captures these feelings of being swallowed up by responsibilities and prioritizing work over loved ones with an infinite number of shades of regret, resolution and miserable human existence to a tee. She is the glue of this movie in that she feels fully textured and battered down by the weight of the world which the Daniels seem to understand. Her character and lack of courage and self-confidence creates empathy for the audience which is aided by an equally outstanding supporting cast that is essential to the film’s idiosyncratic vision.
The concept of multiverses is not groundbreaking film territory to audiences after seeing their favorite Spider-Men fight CGI villains, but the Daniel’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” excels at breathing new life into the idea with a mind-bending and surreal ride of action, absurdity, and tear-jerking emotion. The multiverse movie genre has never felt so creative, disarming and fun, especially in contemporary society where human beings are shown infinite realties of other humans where one can only be left to think of who they wish could be and not who they are in the moment.
Thanks to Michelle Yeoh, Daniels, and cast, this film is a mediation on familial bonds, the roads not taken, the all-consuming everything-ness of life that expands and expands and expands until it bursts into a grand, explosive injection of pathos right into the heart.
Who would have thought that the best movie of the year would be the one to feature the silliest and most hilarious ideas ever introduced into a movie, like two sentient rocks silently talking to each other, yet make it somehow sincere and truly life-affirming with something as simple as a stare or a mother’s hug? “Everything Everywhere All at Once” just proves that storytelling and the medium of filmmaking is far from dead and still being pushed in this universe and the next.