Everything Everywhere All At Once
Few things in life are certain besides death, taxes, and maybe the never-ending task that is doing laundry. At least that's where the characters in writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert , collectively known as Daniels, new film "Everything Everywhere All at Once" find themselves initially. That is, until they take an emotional, philosophical, and deeply weird trip through the looking glass into the multiverse and discover metaphysical wisdom along the way.
In this love letter to genre cinema, Michelle Yeoh gives a virtuoso performance as Evelyn Wang, a weary owner of a laundromat under IRS audit. We first meet her enjoying a happy moment with her husband Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ) and their daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ). We see their smiling faces reflected in a mirror on their living room wall. As the camera literally zooms through the mirror, Evelyn's smile fades, now seated at a table awash with business receipts. She's preparing for a meeting with an auditor while simultaneously trying to cook food for a Chinese New Year party that will live up to the high standards of her visiting father Gong Gong ( James Hong , wiley as ever).
On top of juggling her father's visit and the tax audit, Evelyn's sullen daughter Joy wants to bring her girlfriend Becky ( Tallie Medel ) to the party and her husband wants to talk about the state of their marriage. Just as Evelyn begins to feel overwhelmed by everything happening in her life she's visited by another version of Waymond from what he calls the Alpha verse. Here humans have learned to "verse jump" and are threatened by an omniverse agent of chaos known as Jobu Tupaki. Soon, Evelyn is thrust into a universe-hopping adventure that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her life, her failures, and her love for her family.
Most of the action is set in an IRS office building in Simi Valley (which, as a Californian, had me in stitches), where Evelyn must battle IRS agent Diedre ( Jamie Lee Curtis , having the time of her life), a troop of security guards, and possibly everyone else she's ever met. Production designer Jason Kisvarday crafts a seemingly endless cubicle-filled office where everything from the blade of a paper trimmer to a butt plug shaped auditor of the year awards become fair game in a battle to save the universe.
Editor Paul Rogers' breakneck pace matches the script's frenetic dialogue, with layers of universes simultaneously folding into each other while also propelling Evelyn's internal journey. Match cuts seamlessly connect the universes together, while playful cuts help emphasize the humor at the heart of the film.
Born from choices both made and not made, each universe has a distinct look and feel, with winking film references ranging from " The Matrix " to " The Fall " to " 2001: A Space Odyssey " to "In The Mood For Love" to " Ratatouille ." Even Michelle Yeoh's own legacy finds its way into the film with loving callbacks to her Hong Kong action film days and the wuxia classic " Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ." The fight sequences, choreographed by Andy and Brian Le , have a balletic beauty to them, wisely shot by cinematographer Larkin Seiple in wide shots allowing whole bodies to fill the frame.
Yeoh is the anchor of the film, given a role that showcases her wide range of talents, from her fine martial art skills to her superb comic timing to her ability to excavate endless depths of rich human emotion often just from a glance or a reaction. She is a movie star and this is a movie that knows it. Watching her shine so bright and clearly having a ball brought tears to my eyes more than once.
Just as Evelyn taps into Yeoh's iconography, facets of Waymond can be found throughout Quan's unique career. The comic timing from his childhood roles as Data in " The Goonies " and Short Round in " Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom " echoes in Evelyn's nebbish husband. His work as a fight coordinator shows through in Alpha's slick action hero capable of using a fanny pack to take out a group of attackers. Even his time as an assistant director to Wong Kar Wai on "2046" can be found in the universe where he plays the debonair one who got away. Quan tackles these variations with aplomb, bringing pathos to each and serving as a gentle reminder that there's strength in kindness.
As Evelyn and Waymond's relationship ebbs and flows in iterations through the multiverses, it's their daughter Joy who proves to be the lynchpin. In a true breakout performance from Stephanie Hsu, Joy represents a growing generational divide. Joy carries the weight of Evelyn's fractured relationship with her grandfather and the disappointments of an American dream unattained. Her queerness as foreign to her mother as the country was when she herself first arrived. Her aimlessness a greater disappointment because of all that Eveyln sacrificed for her to have more options in life than she did. This pressure manifests in a rebellion so great it stretches beyond the multiverses into a realm where a giant everything bagel looms like a black hole ready to suck everyone into the void.
If the void arises from the compounding of generational trauma, the Daniels posit that it can be reversed through the unconditional love passed down through those same generations, if we choose compassion and understanding over judgment and rejection. Chaos reigns and life may only ever make sense in fleeting moments, but it's those moments we should cherish. Moments of love and camaraderie. Sometimes they happen over time. Sometimes they happen all at once.
This review was filed from the premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The film opens on March 25th.
Marya E. Gates
Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
- Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang
- Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki
- James Hong as Gong Gong
- Jonathan Ke Quan as Waymond Wang
- Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra
- Anthony Molinari as Police - Confetti
- Jenny Slate as Big Nose
- Andy Le as Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy
- Brian Le as Alpha Jumper - Trophy
- Daniel Scheinert as District Manager
- Harry Shum Jr. as Chad
- Boon Pin Koh as Maternity Doctor
- Daniel Scheinert
Cinematographer
- Larkin Seiple
- Paul Rogers
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‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: It’s Messy, and Glorious
Michelle Yeoh stars as a stressed-out laundromat owner dragged into cosmic battle and genre chaos.
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By A.O. Scott
The idea of the multiverse has been a conundrum for modern physics and a disaster for modern popular culture. I’m aware that some of you here in this universe will disagree, but more often than not a conceit that promises ingenuity and narrative abundance has delivered aggressive brand extension and the infinite recombination of cliché. Had I but world enough and time, I might work these thoughts up into a thunderous supervillain rant, but instead I’m happy to report that my research has uncovered a rare and precious exception.
That would be “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The filmmakers — who work under the name Daniels and who are best known for the wonderfully unclassifiable “Swiss Army Man” (starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse) — are happy to defy the laws of probability, plausibility and coherence. This movie’s plot is as full of twists and kinks as the pot of noodles that appears in an early scene. Spoiling it would be impossible. Summarizing it would take forever — literally!
But while the hectic action sequences and flights of science-fiction mumbo-jumbo are a big part of the fun (and the marketing), they aren’t really the point. This whirligig runs on tenderness and charm. As in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or Pixar’s “Inside Out,” the antic cleverness serves a sincere and generous heart. Yes, the movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.
At the center of it all is Evelyn Wang, played by the great Michelle Yeoh with grace, grit and perfect comic timing. Evelyn, who left China as a young woman, runs a laundromat somewhere in America with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Her life is its own small universe of stress and frustration. Evelyn’s father (James Hong), who all but disowned her when she married Waymond, is visiting to celebrate his birthday. An I.R.S. audit looms. Waymond is filing for divorce, which he says is the only way he can get his wife’s attention. Their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), has self-esteem issues and also a girlfriend named Becky (Tallie Medel), and Evelyn doesn’t know how to deal with Joy’s teenage angst or her sexuality.
The first stretch of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is played in a key of almost-realism. There are hints of the cosmic chaos to come, in the form of ominous musical cues (the score is by Son Lux) and swiveling camera movements (the cinematography is by Larkin Seiple) — but the mundane chaos of Evelyn’s existence provides plenty of drama.
To put it another way, the Daniels understand that she and her circumstances are already interesting. The key to “Everything” is that the proliferating timelines and possibilities, though full of danger and silliness, don’t so much represent an alternative to reality’s drabness as an extension of its complexity.
Things start to get glitchy as Waymond and Evelyn approach their dreaded meeting with Deirdre, an I.R.S. bureaucrat played with impeccable unpleasantness by Jamie Lee Curtis. Waymond — until now a timid, nervous fellow — turns into a combat-ready space commando, wielding his fanny pack as a deadly weapon. He hurriedly explains to Evelyn that the stability of the multiverse is threatened by a power-mad fiend named Jobu Tupaki, and that Evelyn must train herself to jump between universes to do battle. The leaps are accomplished by doing something crazy and then pressing a button on an earpiece. The tax office turns into a scene of martial-arts mayhem. Eventually, Jobu Tupaki shows up, and turns out to be …
You’ll see for yourself. And I hope you do. The Daniels’ command of modern cinematic tropes is encyclopedic, and also eccentric. As Evelyn zigzags through various universes, she finds herself in a live-action rip-off of “Ratatouille” ; a smoky sendup of Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood For Love” ; a world where humans have hot dogs for fingers and play the piano with their feet; and a child’s birthday party where she is a piñata. That is a small sampling. The philosophical foundation for this zaniness is the notion that every choice Evelyn (and everyone else) has made in her life was an unwitting act of cosmogenesis. The roads not taken blossom into new universes. World without end.
The metaphysical high jinks turn out to rest on a sturdy moral foundation. The multiverse — to say nothing of her own family — may lie beyond Evelyn’s control, but she possesses free will, which means responsibility for her own actions and obligations to the people around her. As her adventures grow more elaborate, she seems at first to be one of those solitary, quasi-messianic movie heroes, “the one” who has the power to face down absolute evil.
Yeoh certainly has the necessary charisma, but “Everything Everywhere” is really about something other than the usual heroics. Nobody is alone in the multiverse, which turns out to be a place where families can work on their issues. And while you are likely be tickled and dazzled by the visual variety and whiz-bang effects, you may be surprised to find yourself moved by the performances. Quan, a child star in the 1980s (in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Goonies”), has an almost Chaplinesque ability to swerve from clownishness to pathos. Hsu strikes every note in the Gen-Z songbook with perfect poise. And don’t sleep on grandpa: Hong nearly steals the show.
Is it perfect? No movie with this kind of premise — or that title — will ever be a neat, no-loose-ends kind of deal. Maybe it goes on too long. Maybe it drags in places, or spins too frantically in others. But I like my multiverses messy, and if I say that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is too much, it’s a way of acknowledging the Daniels’ generosity.
Everything Everywhere All at Once Rated R. Fighting and swearing. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. In theaters.
A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott
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Everything Everywhere All at Once Reviews
Imagining the endless possibilities that could come from making a key few different choices at a key few different times opens up a massive can of existential worms that Everything Everywhere All at Once dives headfirst into.
Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 5, 2024
Michelle Yeoh must tackle a destructive hole in the multiverse in this tear-jerking and hopeful sci-fi drama.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2024
It’s hard to grasp how a film so chaotic and heavy with action sequences could produce a theater experience that encompasses equal amounts of fun with emotional sedulity. But the Daniels manage this great task with ease.
Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 23, 2024
t’s so very funny, sweet, and gross in the best ways. There simply isn’t anything else like it.
Full Review | Jul 3, 2024
It is everything for everyone, everywhere. Don’t miss it.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024
This film can’t quite commit to its interdimensional-war gimmick; it’s an appendage, mostly played for laughs, to the real story, which I kept waiting to arrive -- and when it did, I wished it hadn’t.
Full Review | Apr 11, 2024
A great, fabulous, huge movie that is almost literally all heart.
Full Review | Feb 27, 2024
Everything Everywhere All at Once is beautifully chaotic, wonderfully weird, and one of the coolest movies ever made.
Full Review | Sep 27, 2023
The Daniels accomplished something wonderful for the audience.
Full Review | Sep 26, 2023
Michelle Yeoh finally gets a role this decade that pays tribute to her rare talents, and absolutely owns it...
Full Review | Sep 12, 2023
The genre mashup provides a fuller insight into the characters’ personalities than a straight independent film could depict. The multiverse is a metaphor for the different facets of peoples’ potential and makes their internal lives literal.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023
Everything Everywhere All at Once will remind you of why you love cinema. It is fresh, creative, and will leave you laughing and shedding some tears.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 27, 2023
An omnipotent being is threatening the multiverse. Who ya gonna call? Spiderman? Dr. Strange? How about a middle-aged Asian-American woman failing as a wife and mother?
Full Review | Jul 26, 2023
Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the greatest films of all time. Entertaining, hilarious, emotional, wild, unique, action packed, & INSANE
Full Review | Jul 25, 2023
At the heart of it all, we ride a roller coaster of emotions that are inventive, complex, stimulating, and raw.
With such a low budget, it's almost humiliating that so many expensive Hollywood blockbusters can't even reach the heels of so much originality, imagination, excitement, and emotion.
Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a spectacle in the purest sense of the word. A sensory overload, especially in IMAX, the movie is a science fiction, multi-verse spanning love letter to family.
Delightfully disorienting and intellectually absorbing.
Full Review | May 26, 2023
Visual, sonic, and thematic noise.
Full Review | Original Score: ZERO STARS | May 11, 2023
At a few minutes short of two and a half hours, Everything Everywhere All at Once nearly wears out its welcome, but as far as hot dog-fingered audacity goes, the Daniels will make plenty of new eyeballs go googly.
Full Review | May 9, 2023
- Cast & crew
- User reviews
Everything Everywhere All at Once
A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led.
- Daniel Kwan
- Daniel Scheinert
- Michelle Yeoh
- Stephanie Hsu
- Jamie Lee Curtis
- 3.8K User reviews
- 421 Critic reviews
- 81 Metascore
- 411 wins & 393 nominations total
Top cast 44
- Evelyn Wang
- Deirdre Beaubeirdre
- Waymond Wang
- Becky Sregor
- Debbie the Dog Mom
- TV Musical - Queen
- TV Musical - Soldier
- Alpha Jumper - Trophy
- Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy
- Security Guard
- (as a different name)
- Police - Confetti
- Police - Salsa
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Burning Qs With 'Everything Everywhere ...' Stars
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Did you know
- Trivia All the VFX for this film were done by 9 people, including the two directors, with the majority of the shots being done by a core group of 5 people. None of the VFX team went to school for VFX. They were all friends who taught themselves with tutorials they found online for free.
- Goofs At around 5:50 various items of equipment and crew including the boom mic operator can be seen in the reflections of the launderette dryer glass doors.
Waymond Wang : [subtitles] So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.
- Crazy credits Whispering voices speak throughout the end credits, seemingly coming from random universes, in random directions.
- Alternate versions Jenny Slate 's character was originally referred to as 'Big Nose' in the theatrical release. Due to associations with Jewish stereotypes, the character's name was changed to 'Debbie the Dog Mom' in the credits for the digital and DVD/Blu-Ray releases.
- Connections Featured in Jimmy Kimmel Live!: Chris Pine/Ke Huy Quan/Wallows (2022)
- Soundtracks Life Can Be So Delicious Written by Daniel Kwan , Ryan Lott and Daniel Scheinert Performed by Sunita Mani and Aaron Lazar
User reviews 3.8K
Too whacky and not very funny for my taste :-(.
- Jul 8, 2022
- How long is Everything Everywhere All at Once? Powered by Alexa
- April 8, 2022 (United States)
- United States
- Official Instagram
- Todo En Todas Partes Al Mismo Tiempo
- 400 National Way, Simi Valley, California, USA (IRS Building)
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $14,300,000 (estimated)
- $77,191,785
- Mar 27, 2022
- $143,412,671
- Runtime 2 hours 19 minutes
- Dolby Digital
- Dolby Atmos
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There's a multiverse of roads not taken in 'Everything Everywhere All at Once'
Justin Chang
Michelle Yeoh stars as a woman who suddenly develops the power to leap between parallel universes in the action-adventure-fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once. A24 hide caption
Michelle Yeoh stars as a woman who suddenly develops the power to leap between parallel universes in the action-adventure-fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Multiverses are having something of a moment, popping up in recent movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and upcoming ones like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness . It's refreshing, then, to get a new multiverse movie this week that doesn't spring from the world of comic-book superheroes. It's called Everything Everywhere All at Once — an apt title for a movie that imagines the existence of thousands of alternate timelines, featuring thousands of alternate versions of ourselves. It was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, also known as Daniels, who seem intent on topping the anything-goes audacity of Swiss Army Man , their 2016 comedy featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse.
That strain of juvenile humor pops up frequently here: At one point, characters have to make inventive use of a trophy in order to jump from one universe to the next. But for all its gross sight gags and bizarre supernatural conceits, the movie has one pretty coherent purpose: to provide a dazzling actor's showcase for Michelle Yeoh .
In theaters this spring: multiverses, Bat-men, action stars and more
Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese American immigrant who lives in a cramped apartment with her husband, Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan. It's a stressful time for the Wangs: Evelyn has her hands full bickering with their teenage daughter, Joy — a terrific Stephanie Hsu — and planning a birthday party for her ailing father, played by the great 93-year-old veteran James Hong. On top of that, the family business, a laundromat, is being audited by the IRS. The action really begins at the IRS office where Evelyn meets with their auditor, well played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who urges the Wangs to get their paperwork in order.
Evelyn might think she knows the story of her life, but she doesn't know the half of it. Through an extremely bizarre series of events, she learns about the existence of all those other universes, each with its own version of Evelyn. She also learns that she's the only person who can save the whole multiverse from destruction by some powerful force that has taken hold of her daughter, Joy. (As a story of conflict and reconciliation between an Asian mother and daughter, Everything Everywhere All at Once would make a nifty double bill with the current Pixar fantasy Turning Red .)
'Turning Red' confronts the messiness of adolescence with refreshing honesty
In order to defeat evil, Evelyn must repeatedly jump between her universe and others, sort of like a video-game avatar, and absorb crucial knowledge from those other Evelyns, all of whom represent different paths she could have taken through life. There's Evelyn the Hong Kong movie star, Evelyn the Peking opera singer and Evelyn the teppanyaki chef. Imagine a very long, unusually surreal Choose Your Own Adventure novel in which all the pages have been torn out and glued back together at random, and you'll have some sense of how this movie plays.
All this Matrix -style interdimensional hopping, plus the nonstop martial-arts action and in-your-face slapstick, makes Everything Everywhere All at Once an often frenetic viewing experience, and I checked out more than once the first time I saw it. But there are playful ideas beneath that busy surface. Notably, all those other Evelyns seem to be leading more fulfilling lives than Evelyn the unhappy wife, mom and laundromat owner. This is very much a movie about regret and disappointment, about the frustration of feeling that life's best opportunities have passed you by. It's no wonder that one of Evelyn's timelines pays homage to Wong Kar-wai 's In the Mood for Love , one of the greatest movies ever made about the road not taken.
Adding to that subtext is the casting of Michelle Yeoh, who's one of Asia's top stars but, despite some recent supporting roles in Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings , has never had the spectacular Hollywood career she's deserved. Directors Kwan and Scheinert are clearly trying to rectify that. This movie is as passionate and exhaustive a love letter to an actor as I've ever seen, and Yeoh's performance combines action, comedy, drama and emotion in ways she's never done before. Ke Huy Quan is working just as hard here as a neglected husband whose reserves of quiet strength Evelyn takes for granted. This is a big comeback role for Quan, whom you may remember as the '80s child star from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies.
For all its cosmic craziness, Everything Everywhere All at Once has a simple emotional message: It's about how the members of this immigrant family learn to cherish each other again. It's also about making peace with the life you've lived — and the ones you haven't. And that sort of sums up how I feel about this funny, messy, moving and often exasperating movie: There may be a better, more focused version of it in some other universe, but I'm still grateful for the one we've got.
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