Review of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) by Markhreviews — 14 Apr 2022

The film title for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is its best possible plot summary. The film is chaotic, disorienting, innovative, thought-provoking, undisciplined and profoundly moving. It’s impossible to summarize briefly. But “Everything …” is also the best reason to venture out to a movie theater since the pandemic began over two years ago.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the Daniels - who co-wrote and co-directed this film, are veterans of several movie shorts and music videos. Their previous feature film, 2016’s “Swiss Army Man,” is summarized by IMDb as follows: “A hopeless man stranded on a desert island befriends a dead body, and together they go on a surreal journey to get home.” In “Everything …” they graduate from mundane topics like human mortality to tackle the multiverse.

The idea of the multiverse posits that there are an infinite number of universes – “alternate universes” or “parallel universes” – where the consequences of all the choices we make or don’t make are played out to their logical conclusions. It’s an idea that has been endorsed by Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson. But philosophically, it’s a pretty depressing brand of nihilism: how can life have meaning if none of our choices really matter?

The Daniels use the multiverse for two purposes. First, when characters jump from one alternate universe to another, the moviegoer can explore the alternate life stories of the primarily characters, particularly Evelyn (a spectacular Michelle Yeoh - 2000’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) who is an unhappily married, dissatisfied co-owner of a laundromat whose main achievement has been disappointing her father. But in alternate universes where she has made different choices, Evelyn is, variously, a famous singer, a star of martial arts films, a sign-twirler on the street, a resident of a universe where everyone has hotdogs instead of fingers and, most poignantly, one of two sentient rocks on an uninhabitable planet (the most touching scenes in the film). Evelyn bounces from one universe to another to help her struggling daughter Joy (yes, I do see the irony) who, as many parents would predict, is both a confused young adult and also Jobu Tupaki, an arch-villain bent on destroying the multiverse. In one scene, Joy/Jobu confides that she has used her superpowers to place all the important things in the world in a bagel (you got it: an “everything bagel”).

The Daniels also use alternate universes to explore core concepts around family dynamics: the paralytic effect of parental disapproval; the notion that a family member’s quiet inaction sometimes represents kindness and strength, not passivity; and finally the strong suggestion that parental love is the most powerful force in the universe. At the end of the day, this weirdly wonderful film shares a powerful theme with the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and almost any good Kurt Vonnegut novel: in a confusing, scary, sometimes brutal universe, we’d all be better off if we all treated one another with a little more kindness.