Everything Everywhere All at Once

If nothing really matters, why don’t we all just be kind? Writer/director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels) throw this existential question into the maximalist multiverse chaos of their sci-fi action dramedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film’s advocacy for kindness amid the zeitgeist’s omnipresent nihilism is heartfelt and hard-earned – and not without diving deep first into the dark, sticky terrains of our morals and minds.

Daniels have a knack for deriving a bizarre yet visceral sense of positivity and intimacy from the dark humours of their zany audiovisuals – as showcased in their debut feature Swiss Army Man, which depicts an earnest bromance between a young man and a farting corpse. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, they have turned it up a thousand notches in cooking up a macro cinematic feast, while underlying the film’s genre hodgepodge with intersectional specificities of Asianness, queerness, and generational traumas.

The film introduces a Chinese American family that owns a laundromat: the short-tempered Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) who is having a midlife crisis; her gentle, meek husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) who feels neglected in their failing marriage; and their alienated daughter Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu) who struggles with Evelyn’s intolerance of her basic identities.

While the dysfunctional family tries to juggle Evelyn’s father Gong Gong’s (James Hong) birthday party and IRS agent Deidre Beaubeidra’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) tax audit of their family business, Evelyn is given the opportunity to universe-jump and experience alternate lives.

From here, the film achieves the impossible by manifesting the perfectly imperfect reconciliation of an everyday Asian immigrant family in narrative parallels with the multiverse destructions and reconstructions of entire humanities. Challenging our linear notions of time and space, Paul Rogers’ fast-paced yet precise editing brings Yeoh’s breathtaking range to the fore. With each close-up frame of her as the Evelyns of the myriad universes flashing before our eyes, the film boasts Yeoh’s versatile emotional expressions along with her renowned martial prowess.

The same goes for the rest of the main cast. Their adaptive, accurate depictions of the respective multiverse versions of Waymond, Joy, Gong Gong, and Deidre make the film’s convoluted metanarrative substantially easier to follow. Opposite Pan-Asian cinema and Hollywood icon Yeoh, Hsu fearlessly holds her own with her mercurial screen presence and explosive cerebral energy – an acting force to be reckoned with.

Just like Yeoh’s Evelyn, Waymond is the complex, nuanced, and one-of-a-kind character Quan has been long waiting for. His affecting portrayal of the always kind Waymond is central to the film’s tenet that empathy is strategic and necessary for us to survive in a world of information overload and mass paranoia – everything, everywhere, all at once, is too much for us to handle without our love and care for each other as foundations and shields.

In praise of Yeoh’s fierce career and her fellow Asian acting talents, Daniels plant countless easter eggs for film nerds to discover. Paying tribute to the vast repertoire of Hollywood classics and world cinema, Everything Everywhere All at Once strikes an immaculate balance between mind-blowing originality and nostalgic cinephilia. While its commercially successful predecessors such as Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi bear contextual meanings as cultural milestones, this film – despite its whirlwinds of delicious madness – gets back to the basics of good filmmaking first and foremost.