Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Ley Line Entertainment

VERDICT: Michelle Yeoh plays a kick-ass Chinese-American matriarch fighting the forces of darkness across multiple universes in this wildly inventive, prize-winning philosophical action comedy from writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

Originally published Jan. 16, 2023

A gonzo rollercoaster ride through a multiverse of madness, Everything Everywhere All at Once feels like a Marvel superhero blockbuster scripted by Charlie Kaufman. This hugely entertaining maximalist mash-up of action comedy, sci-fi thriller, martial arts fight-fest, existential art-house drama, Asian-American family saga and pro-LGBT message movie was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as “Daniels”, who made their feature debut with the absurdist comic fable Swiss Army Man (2016).

Released last year, Everything Everywhere All at Once has become blossoming left-field indie distributor A24’s biggest box office hit to date, earning over $100 million, and is now gaining a second wind as a major awards contender. Its lead actors, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, both took home Golden Globes last week. Yesterday at the Critics’ Choice awards, it won five major prizes including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. With multiple nominations for the upcoming BAFTAS, Screen Actors Guild awards and Oscars, this audaciously ambitious multi-genre cocktail is starting to look like a modern cult classic, boosted by a rare convergence of commercial success and wide critical acclaim

Kwan and Scheinert conceived Everything Everywhere All at Once as a vehicle for Hong Kong screen icon Jackie Chan, but later reworked and gender-flipped the story for Yeoh. She stars as Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese immigrant now living in the US, who is struggling to keep her family laundromat business afloat just as her marriage to Waymond Wang (Quan) hangs in the balance. Meanwhile, Evelyn’s relationship with her grown-up daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is painfully tense, mostly because Joy’s homosexuality jars with the more socially conservative Chinese values of her domineering grandfather Gong Gong (James Hong). In the midst of these family frictions, Evelyn is summoned to her local tax office to resolve some serious financial problems with stern IRS officer Dierdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is threatening to shut down the laundry business over unpaid debts.

Just when it seems Evelyn’s day could not get any worse, she encounters an alternative version of Waymond at the tax office, who arrives from one of infinite parallel universes to warn her she is in great danger. The pyrotechnic explosion of plots that follows is too dense and loopy to elaborate here, but it entails Evelyn learning to jump around the multiverse herself, where she is able to glimpse the different lives she might have lived in other timelines: martial arts movie star, opera singer, and thousands more. The reason for all these ruptures in the fabric of space-time, it emerges, is because Evelyn is being recruited by the other Waymond and his universe-hopping warriors to fight an all-powerful alternate version of Joy, a sassy supervillain with a striking line in kaleidoscopic hair and eye-popping outfits.

Yeoh and Quan do a fine job of gear-shifting between multiple iterations of their characters, especially when they switch from dowdy, downtrodden, soon-to-be-divorced couple to suave, wealthy, never-married versions of themselves in another universe. Curtis is also great fun in a frumpy, unsympathetic, comic-villain role. But the main acting honours go to Hse, who pulls off the largest pendulum swing from wounded, underconfident tomboy to intergalactic glamazon uber-diva. Special mention is also due to the spry performance from James Hong, a 93-year-old screen legend with more than 600 credits including Chinatown (1974), Blade Runner (1982), and Kung Fu Panda (2008).

In between hyperkinetic Looney Tunes action sequences and visually dazzling high-speed jump-cut montages, Everything Everywhere All at Once makes some bittersweet Kaufman-esque points about the allure of nihilism in a meaningless cosmos, generational trauma, the Asian-American immigrant experience, the importance of family and the healing power of love. These tonal shifts could have been corny and sentimental but Kwan and Scheinert mostly strike a healthy balance between profundity and levity, sincerity and silliness.

Along the way, the directors also milk maximum comic mileage from their anything-goes premise, gorging on the full humour menu from lowbrow to high. In one alternate universe, for example, everybody has hot dog sausages for fingers. Dildos and sex toys also feature heavily, often in hilariously incongruous ways, alongside multiple winking homages to classic movies including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Matrix (1999). In one particularly striking subplot, Evelyn and Joy manifest as lonely rocks perched on the edge of a desert valley on a lifeless planet, their telepathic conversation rendered as on-screen subtitles. The effect is goofy and surreal, but also strangely moving.

As its attention-grabbing title suggests, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a supercharged, sense-swamping, overstuffed feast of a movie. The distended running time, WTF plot twists, jarring multiverse leaps and occasional lapses into broad slapstick humour risk becoming excessive and exhausting in places. A few of the cinematic in-jokes, notably a recurring gag about Ratatouille (2007), complete with Randy Newman vocal cameo, feel superfluous in an already bewildering jumble of plots. But for broad-minded and genre-fluid audiences, there are great riches to enjoy here on multiple levels. More prizes seem guaranteed, not just in this universe but on any planet where audiences appreciate hugely imaginative comedy-action blockbusters that appeal to heart and brain alike.

Directors, screenwriters: Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tallie Medel, Jenny Slate
Producers: Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Jonathan Wang
Cinematography: Larkin Seiple
Editing: Paul Rogers
Production design: Jason Kisvarday
Costume design: Shirley Kurata
Visual effects supervisor: Zak Stoltz
Music: Son Lux
Production companies: IAC Films (US), Gozie Agbo (US), Year of the Rat (US), Ley Line Entertainment (US)
In English, Mandarin, Cantonese
139 minutes