SXSW 2022 Film Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Michelle Yeoh’s Multiverse of Madness
Exploding intimate family drama into a multiverse-jumping, martial arts, sci-fi epic, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a blast of inventive genre fiction. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively and affectionately known as just Daniels, follow up their feature debut of Swiss Army Man with lunatic glee, stretching the limits of visual and kinetic storytelling to its absolute breaking point. Steadied with the incredible - and very game - cast of Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and James Hong, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Minor spoilers ahead…
The multiverse: an infinite, sprawling corridor of countless possibilities, forever expanding the roads not taken and the choices that lie ahead. In today’s climate, perhaps there’s a reason this sci-fi concept - with its roots in comic book history - has invaded the genre and blockbuster zeitgeist. Where the recent spate of superhero films (here’s looking at you, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and The Flash) are jostling the multiverse to pull on the heartstrings of nostalgia, unmooring past versions of heroes to tickle the “I recognize that!” parts of our pop-culture lizard brains, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once has something completely different on its mind. Pulling influence from everything from The Matrix to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ratatouille, Daniels - as the duo are collectively known - has crafted a thoughtful family drama detonated into brain-melting, action sci-fi absurdity.
On its surface, Everything Everywhere All at Once is as mundane as can be: a simple story of a jaded Asian American woman just trying to file her taxes. Evelyn Wang (an enthusiastic and electric Michelle Yeoh) lives a rudderless existence as the owner of a failing laundromat, a passenger in a life full of shorn branches and eroded promises. Choosing to immigrate to California rather than live with her father’s (James Hong, spry as ever at 93) disapproval over her meek but stubbornly good-natured husband Waymond (an incredible Ke Huy Quan in his first major role since 1984’s Temple of Doom), Evelyn ekes out a meager life wading through bills, bristling against her husband’s happy-go-lucky habit of pasting googly eyes on every surface, and being just as inconsiderate of her queer daughter’s (Stephanie Hsu, the film’s biggest surprise) relationship as her own father was with her’s. Even in America, her father’s shadow looms large, as Gong Gong - now wheelchair-bound - has come over for a Chinese New Year visit. When the family gathers for an emergency audit at the IRS office with the bitter and threatening inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), the Wangs face financial ruin, but even worse, the meeting is interrupted by a grave warning from an alternate universe Alpha Waymond: The multiversal terror known as Jobu Tupaki is coming, and Evelyn is the only one who can stop her.
“Daniels…has crafted a thoughtful family drama detonated into brain-melting, action sci-fi absurdity.”
More Rick and Morty’s Interdimensional Cable than Spider-Man: No Way Home, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a full-barrage assault on the senses in the best way possible. Using a technique monikered “verse-jumping,” Alpha Waymond teaches Evelyn to pull various skills from adjacent realities to do battle: It’s a frenzied tour of the multiverse that puts her on a collision course with the ultimate evil. As we witness a wild array of Michelle Yeohs - from martial artist to teppanyaki chef to a universe where everyone has non-functioning hot dog length fingers - Evelyn also confronts her own existential crisis, exploding her very conceptions about life, love, and most importantly, her relationships. You see, Everything isn’t about the “chosen one,” it’s about the “unchosen one.” In the film’s most curious wrinkle, it turns out this Evelyn is uniquely suited to get the most out of “verse-jumping” because in an omniverse of infinite Evelyns, none have missed more opportunities or failed to realize their potential more than this one.
In many ways, Everything Everywhere All at Once is absolutely on the same wavelength as Daniels’ first feature, Swiss Army Man, which finds Daniel Radcliffe as a corpse with flatulence so powerful he becomes a jet ski. The beauty of Daniels’ work here transcends what easily could have been too cute by half; from Kung Fu butt plugs to piñata universes to a raccoon-themed riff on Ratatouille, the film’s silly, ribald, and irreverent imagery is dialed up to eleven, but there’s a profound sincerity that pulses underneath Everything’s warped exterior. In a movie about infinite possibilities, its characters share the same dimensionality as the sprawling multiverse; Michelle Yeoh digs deep as both action star and enervated mom, and Ke Huy Quan shines with nebbish cluelessness as well as tenderness (an In the Mood for Love pastiche generates the film’s most touching moments). But it’s Stephanie Hsu who shines brightest in a star-making turn: in a film where everyone contains multitudes, Hsu’s Joy is a paradox on a tightrope. Balancing grounded melancholy with maniacal glee that both somehow - palpably - originate from the very same place, Hsu is the beating heart of the story: a maelstrom of hurt, rage, and vulnerability.
“The film’s
silly, ribald, and irreverent imagery is dialed up to eleven, but there’s a profound sincerity that pulses underneath Everything’s warped exterior.”
It also helps that Everything Everywhere All at Once is an adrenaline-pumping blast. Manic in its momentum, fight coordinators Andy and Brian Le tether their balletic fight scenes to DP Larkin Sieple’s kinetic camerawork, giving us some of the most invigorating, cinematic action in years: From Alpha Waymond decimating some goons with a fanny pack to Evelyn “verse-jumping” into a street-side sign spinner, Everything’s set pieces will have your entire theater audience hollering. But a special shoutout must be given to editor Paul Rogers, whose whip-smart cutting is akin to the magic of a quick change artist, stitching whole realities together in a dazzling display of filmmaking - a testament to practical artistry and how much an editor matters within the craft.
“Everything but the kitchen sink” is rarely an approach that works in storytelling, but when it comes to Everything Everywhere All at Once - if you couldn’t tell by the title - it’s a feature, not a bug. Bombastic popcorn action that stretches to the outer boundaries of creativity, Daniels’ latest is a genre fan’s ultimate fantasy, but none of it would work without its emotional throughline. You might be taken by the best action you’ve seen in years, mesmerized by the audacity of a quantum everything bagel, or enamored with cyborg Gong Gong, but in the wild expanse of the swirling multiverse where everything everywhere happens all at once, there’s only one constant: our connections with each other.
