*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Lucia Ruan’s review here, and Steven Gong’s review here.*
There is nothing like Everything Everywhere All at Once. It is one of the exceedingly rare blockbuster-scale films that seems as though its writer-directors have complete agency to follow any and every creative instinct that strikes their fancy, with zero interference from financiers and no concessions to popular taste. It is stylistically forceful, thematically poignant, and narratively unparalleled in ambition and scope—so overwhelmingly maximalist in every sense that it effectively transcends genre and its multitude of influences. It is constantly referential and rarely reverential—self-aware but unabashedly earnest.
The film follows the Wangs, a Chinese American family who are great at running their laundromat, terrible at doing taxes, and even worse at emotional vulnerability. The story hinges on Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her difficult relationships with her aloof husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), her queer daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and her demanding father (James Hong). Evelyn’s cold detachment from her family members sharply contrasts with the energy that she brings to her work––she’s developed such a steady community establishment that the entire neighborhood comes to the laundromat for a Lunar New Year celebration.
Sounds like the start of a simple, unassuming little family drama! But after setting the relational pieces in place, writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert move them into the most bananas places imaginable. In the middle of a meeting at an IRS office, Evelyn is sucked into a pocket dimension and begins a bizarre quest as savior of the multiverse. Evelyn and her allies (including an elseworld Waymond) can access memories of their alternate selves––versions whose universes diverged from our own with every microscopic decision––and use those memories to temporarily unlock skills to fight a force that threatens the multiverse.
The film steadily builds dense sci-fi rules and multiversal lore, but never requires a comprehensive understanding of its mechanics to fully appreciate the humor, action, and emotion at its core. It draws so many elements from so many influences that it feels indebted to everything but somehow completely original––the Wachowski Sisters’ empathetic sci-fi action, Wong Kar-wai’s gorgeous urban nighttime photography and romantic yearning, Charlie Kaufman’s layers of surreal existentialism, Pixar’s broad metaphors for intergenerational angst, and even Rick and Morty’s imaginative multiversal comedy all blend together to make an uncategorizable genre-bender. There’s exquisitely choreographed Hong Kong-style action sequences, absurd physical humor, and bursts of psychedelic CGI, all captured with the Daniels’ instantly-identifiable style.
As in their debut Swiss Army Man and their music video for DJ Snake’s “Turn Down for What,” the filmmakers utilize rapid editing to a bombastic soundtrack, present large swaths of the movie in ridiculous slow motion, and visualize movement in such a way that most big gestures shake the camera to increase their impact. Across their small body of work so far, the directors seem immensely fascinated by the grotesque machinery of the human body and want to push its forms and abilities. But where other cinematic body fetishists like David Cronenberg weaponize human anatomy for horror, the Daniels instead repeatedly exploit it for humor and marvel at its potential.
Yeoh has been an international star for decades, but has mostly been relegated to supporting roles in American films like Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi. Here, she finally gets to demonstrate the vast range of her abilities: her dialogue vacillates between multiple languages as she performs elaborate fight choreography, relishes comic reactions to absurd situations, and switches between alternate versions of the same character. But the most impressive performative skill in this film is her ability to smoothly transition between her character’s different familial roles––wife, daughter, mother––and imbue each relationship with a distinct emotional flavor that evolves as the film progresses. Everyone on the planet acts slightly differently depending on the person they’re talking to, but few films attempt to capture these subtleties, perhaps for the sake of character consistency. Yeoh manages to thread the needle by acting distinctly around each other primary character while still maintaining a continuity of performance across each relationship.
In her scenes with Hsu, Yeoh moves from anxious, guarded dismissiveness––rooted in concern about social perceptions of her daughter’s identity and appearance––to careful attention and a genuinely carefree attitude toward what others think. There’s a defensive condescension in each of her line deliveries in their earliest shared scenes that completely evaporates in favor of overwhelming earnestness and love by the finale. With Hong, she’s hesitant and fearful of his personal judgment, speaking with a subtle reluctance in every word that suggests a lifetime of devastation from her father’s casual harshness––and by the end of the movie, she enthusiastically drops the facade and confronts him with the complete truth, almost stumbling over herself in excitement. But her most affecting emotional transformation comes in her string of scenes with Quan. Yeoh acts coldly and rudely to her on-screen husband at the beginning of the movie, making it clear that she doesn’t take him seriously––until she’s reinvigorated by an alternate action-hero version of him, and she’s suddenly warm, entertained, and a little flirtatious. She then confusedly switches between coldness and warmth as Quan’s character changes back and forth, until her distinct attitudes toward her two husbands gradually melt together into a new, almost desperate passion.
It helps that Quan is undoubtedly the heart of the movie. After imprinting on generations of young moviegoers with winsome roles in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, Quan stepped away from stateside acting due to a lack of opportunities for Asian actors. Here, he makes his triumphant return to cinemas as Everything’s most charming character. He brings appropriate humor and gravitas to each distinct version of Waymond––he’s funny as a dopey dad, hyper-confident and athletic as an action star, and poetically contemplative as a dapper Tony Leung-inspired heartthrob––yet fills each one with consistent kindness and grace. He gets to state one of the film’s many theses about two thirds of the way through, delivering a moving monologue about persistent kindness and patience as the ultimate defense against the world’s darkness. Even though it’s funnier than most comedies, more thought-provoking than most sci-fi, and more kinetic than most action-adventure movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once would remain a triumph if you stripped away all of its indulgent style and sci-fi mechanics because its core fixation on radical empathy and emotional honesty has so much raw power. Its optimism feels almost revolutionary, spinning existential purpose out of kindness and love in the face of nihilism. In both style and substance, it makes almost all other movies look restrained by comparison.