SXSW ’22: Mind-Blowing ‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE’ Is the Multiverse of Madness We Deserve

Everything Everywhere All At Once truly is the multiverse of madness that we deserve. Hilarious, utterly singular, and weirdly profound, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner (aka “The Daniels”) have cooked up something wholly original with their martial-arts multiversal science-fiction story about a Chinese family that owns a laundry mat. A genius-level explosion of creativity that blends Wuxia sci-fi with the vast endlessness that is literally the spectrum of onscreen possibility, there’s is a film that borders on the insane and is never anything less than wowing. To say I had a smile plastered on my face the entire time would be to overlook that fact that everyone around me did as well.

Not since 1999’s The Matrix has a movie felt so boldly destined to redefine what modern action science fiction looks like. It should be no surprise then that the Daniels use that film as a reference point within their own, flipping the “Chosen One” narrative on its head to center their story on a hero chosen precisely because she is the least successful version of herself – with surprisingly tender ramifications. The result is a dizzying blend of styles and tones, one that mashes up massive apocalyptic stakes, martial arts melees, and small scale family drama. There’s no inch of their own multiverse that the Daniels avoid exploring – from realities where characters have hotdogs for fingers to others where they are but inanimate rocks.

Before Doctor Strange has even made his way back to the big screen, the idea of a multiverse has proven not only financially viable at the box office race for global dominion but an almost sure-thing. This past December, Spider-Man: No Way Home broke box office records by rallying three generations of the character together. But despite the achievements of other multiversal film, Everything Everywhere All At Once hums with a different kind of potential and possibility because truly nothing is off limits or outside the scope of the Daniels’ wunderkind creativity.

The film from the Swiss Army Man writers-directors is about Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh, better than she’s ever been here), a rudderless Chinese-American laundry mat owner whose biggest current concern is making it through her IRS audit. IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis) looks upon Evelyn with a mix of annoyance and pity. Her bumbling, happy-go-lucky husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, in one of his few rare appearances since playing Short Round in Indiana Jones so many years ago) is a thorn in Evelyn’s side.

As is her lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu in a major breakout role), who, like any Chinese mother worth her salt, she accuses of being overfed and under-motivated. The legendary 93-year old James Hong appears as Gong Gong, Evelyn’s traditional father who after years spent estranged has reunited with his daughter if not fully accepted her for who she is.

The tension between the Wang family cements the emotional foundation of the film as it heads to weirder and weirder narrative places, building towards an inter dimensional statement on the unbreakable bonds of family that’s genuinely meaningful and profound. When Evelyn is approached by the “Alpha-verse” version of Waymond who tells her that she alone can help save every known timeline from an inter-dimensional entity hellbent on annihilation, Everything Everywhere All At Once leans into the insane hilarity of everything whilst world-building on a level that few single films can ever hope to achieve. When Alpha Waymond teaches Evelyn to “verse-jump”, she taps into the endless versions of herself where the smallest choices lead to completely different lifestyles and skills. Skills – like karate, sign spinning, or becoming a second-rate Hibachi chef – that she is able to exploit as a form of combat.

The Daniels have a ridiculous amount of fun playing around with the myriad ways that Evelyn and company both queue themselves up to verse-jump – achieved by doing something “unique” like paper-cutting the webs between all your fingers or licking a booger – and how they deploy Evelyn’s newly acquired “special set of skills”. There’s is a world unbothered by the limits of the imagination, where indeed anything and everything is possible. And here, everything and everything happen. But it’s in the internal collision of love and hate and potential and disappointment that make the film percolate with a special sort of magic. If this is not definitive groundbreaking cinema, I don’t know what is.

CONCLUSION: ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is a madcap, prismatic martial arts sci-fi family movie that refracts the entire scope of cinema and reality through the plight of a Chinese-American laundry mat owner. Quite simply one of the most original films ever made.