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• DVD & Streaming

Everything Everywhere All at Once

• Action/Adventure , Comedy , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• March 25, 2022
• Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang; Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang; Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang; James Hong as Gong Gong; Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdra; Tallie Medel as Becky Sregor; Jenny Slate as Big Nose; Harry Shum Jr. as Chad; Biff Wiff as Rick

Home Release Date

• June 7, 2022
• Dan Kwan; Daniel Scheinert

Distributor

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

If I invited you to a movie about a laundromat owner undergoing a tax audit, you’d probably ask me to stop inviting you to watch boring movies.

But what if I told you the movie explores philosophy through the multiverse?

Yes, they’re the same movie.

Evelyn Wang lives a stressful life. The IRS is hounding the family laundromat; she’s needing to prepare food for her ever-ungrateful father; her daughter, Joy, despises her; and her husband, Waymond, is thinking of filing for divorce.

But if she thought it couldn’t get any more stressful, well, she’s wrong. Because suddenly, Waymond starts acting erratically. He informs her that the multiverse is real, an evil being known as the Jobu Tupaki is seeking to kill and destroy everything in it and the laundromat-owning Evelyn is the only one who can stop it.

“I’m not your husband,” Waymond tells her. “I’m another version of him from another universe. I’m here because we need your help.”

“Very busy today,” Evelyn tells him, “I have no time to help you.”

But when everyone around her suddenly seems to have nothing better to do that to hunt her down and kill her, Evelyn quickly realizes that she doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

Positive Elements

[ Spoilers are contained in this section ] Evelyn’s husband Waymond (all versions of him, actually) shows an unrelenting positivity that is unmatched by any other character in the film. Though it initially appears that Waymond is simply another rehash of the happy-go-lucky dumb husband trope that pervades many movies and TV shows, we learn the real reason for his joy: he uses it as a way to survive.

The movie introduces us to a nihilistic argument: Nothing matters, so what’s the point of living? Waymond’s contagious joy is used to fight against this idea. And throughout the movie, Evelyn discovers that his contentment in all circumstances is often more effective at dealing with their problems than her style of battening down the hatches and preparing the cannons. To be clear, he doesn’t ignore the problems—he just slaps a pair of googly eyes on them and then gets to work.

His optimism eventually seeps into Evelyn, and we see her use his advice to triumph over many of her adversaries. Instead of her simple-yet-ineffective method of “punch first, ask questions later,” she overcomes her opponents through reminding them that there are things they still enjoy even in a universe where nothing seems to matter—just as Waymond had done for her. Of course, a couple of these reminders are unsavory, but others remind us of happy memories in life, such as Evelyn spraying a man with the perfume his wife wore when she was alive.

And though Evelyn’s daughter Joy deeply desires to fall into a pit of annihilation and despair, Evelyn refuses to allow her to do so. Even as Joy fights against her, Evelyn holds and protects her daughter from becoming consumed by depression. Evelyn doesn’t deny either of their flaws or miscommunications, but she instead reminds Joy that she loves her and would much rather live together with their flaws than exist in a world without her.

There are also elements throughout the film which talk about the importance of marriage. Waymond introduces divorce papers to Evelyn early on in the film, yes, but it is clear that neither of them actually want it to come to that: Waymond mournfully looks on toward a happy elderly couple, one of whom gently kisses the other on the cheek. Waymond and Evelyn both believe that it is wrong to divorce, and they reference the sacred vows they made to one another. In fact, Waymond states that he’s only brought the papers because another friend told him that having the papers in front of them might restore their marriage by making the prospect of divorce seem more real—and force them to have difficult, but important, conversations.

Though the effectiveness of that strategy seems dubious, it’s apparent that everything Waymond is doing is an effort to restore a marriage that has fallen from unconditional love to little more than resigned dependence. But as Evelyn jumps from a universe with Waymond to a universe without him—a universe where she’s rich and successful— she rejects that more glamorous life to spend a harder, tax-and-laundry-filled existence with him.

Spiritual Elements

In addition to a few minor spiritual quips (listed below), a major part of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a nihilistic discussion on existence. Because the characters have the ability to obtain any skill, life and circumstance they desire by jumping from universe to universe, the Jobu Tupaki asserts that nothing truly matters. She has seen everything and has constructed an “everything bagel,” with literally everything on it, from emotions to report cards to sesame seeds. That bagel taught her that existence itself is futile and pointless—where people have merely a few moments of clarity amid a sea of chaos.

Believe it or not, that’s actually a biblical principle—at least, part of one. The author of Ecclesiastes wrote the same thing: “ Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun ” ( Eccles. 1:2-3 )? Whether it’s the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, wisdom or status, everything is ultimately meaningless—like trying to grab vapor in the wind. We all die, we are forgotten and the world moves on without us. Life is chaotic and out of our control.

But, unlike Joy, the author doesn’t end it on that depressing note. Instead, he points us to the purpose of life at the end of the book: “ The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man ” ( Eccles. 12:13 , cf. John 15:1-11 ). In one sense, the Jobu Tupaki is correct—life is merely a vapor in the wind, here today and gone tomorrow, so what’s the point? But the flaw in the Jobu Tupaki’s philosophy is in not acknowledging an eternal God who does not pass away and can therefore be a firm foundation.

Jokes are made about the clothes worn by Becky, Joy’s girlfriend—with Becky being told they have a “hot Mormon look.” A man says, “God rest her soul.” Evelyn discusses souls. A woman sings Franz Schubert’s “Ellens dritter Gesang” (more commonly nicknamed “Ave Maria”). Waymond briefly mentions a friend from church. Waymond says he’s happy “chance” allowed him and Evelyn to spend some time together.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Throughout the film, Evelyn and Waymond discuss getting a divorce. At one point, we see Evelyn sign the divorce papers. We briefly see Evelyn’s face as she’s apparently having sex in a split-second scene, though nothing else is shown. Evelyn causes two people to get married, and she spanks another man and uses bondage equipment on him.

An IRS auditor named Deirdre Beaubeirdra has three trophies of sex toys on her desk for being auditor of the month. A police officer’s baton is turned into a sex toy resembling male genitalia (which later, magically, transforms into two such toys), and the Jobu Tupaki beats him to death with them. An office has a hidden room filled with sex toys.

In the movie’s lore, doing something weird will help connect you to another universe’s version of yourself, allowing you to access that version of you’s abilities—as we explain in Other Negative Elements below. As such, in one fight scene, a man attempts to sit on a sex toy to regain his fighting powers Another man who isn’t wearing pants succeeds in sitting on the toy (his genitals are censored), and the other man sticks another object up his rear. Both men fight Evelyn with the items still stuck in their rears, and Evelyn pulls them out to rid them of their powers.

Joy is a lesbian and is dating another girl named Becky. In one universe, Evelyn is a lesbian, and we see her and her partner engage in affectionate and even slightly sensual activity (though nothing critical is shown, and it’s done for comic effect). Evelyn and Waymond kiss. Joy and Becky kiss on a couple of occasions. An elderly couple kisses. In a universe where humans have hot dogs for fingers, people put their fingers in one another’s mouths, causing ketchup and mustard to shoot out.

Violent Content

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a very odd movie with an oddly fitting title. It is important for the reader to remember that because this film deals with a multiverse, characters who are hurt or die in one may still be alive in another.

Evelyn is killed by a pipe to the head. Evelyn is also killed after overloading her brain from jumping to too many universes. She punches, kicks and grapples with many people. At one point, she uses a riot shield as a weapon against a group of people. Evelyn stabs someone with a shard of glass. She also smashes a window with a baseball bat.

Waymond’s neck is snapped, and another version of Waymond also dies. He fights a group of security officers with a fanny pack, knocking them all out, and he fights Deirdre. Waymond slaps Evelyn. Waymond is tased.

Dierdre fights Evelyn and Waymond, and at one point, she slams herself into a wall headfirst. She also staples a piece of paper to her head.

Someone tells Evelyn to kill someone else with a box cutter before they are possessed by the Jobu Tupaki. The Jobu Tupaki stabs itself, and it uses ketchup to pretend it was shot by a gun. The Jobu Tupaki attempts to ends its existence. A car crashes. A group of police officers are killed in a variety of ways—one is shot to death, one pops into a spray of confetti and one is beaten to death with sex toys. A split-second scene shows a bus driver about to be hit in a head-on collision.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is used 15 times. “B–ch,” “d–n” and “p-ss” are occasionally heard as well. God’s name is misused nearly 15 times.

Alpha Waymond calls Evelyn the “worst” version of Evelyn.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Joy and Becky are seen in a bar. Joy asks if Evelyn is drunk. The Jobu Tupaki smokes a cigarette, and she uses the barrel of a gun like a vape.

Evelyn drinks a beer. Evelyn tries vaping. Waymond smokes a cigarette.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Evelyn throws up due to morning sickness, and she also throws up from jumping to too many universes. A version of Evelyn is seen in a baby bonnet and covered in blood. One universe shows humans evolved from monkeys. A woman swings a dog on its leash to use as a weapon to attack Evelyn. Evelyn wets herself.

The characters are able to instantly learn how to perform skills that other versions of themselves have mastered by jumping to their universe and obtaining that version’s memories. However, in order to jump universes, characters must first do a strange, often unpleasant action, all of which are listed below.

Waymond eats lip balm, and he chews gum stuck under a table. Waymond also gives himself paper cuts between his fingers. Evelyn must convincingly tell Deirdre that she loves her, she forces her father to eat his own snot and she snorts a fly. Deirdre staples a paper to her forehead.

A couple of scenes contain bright flashing lights, creating a strobe light effect that may be difficult for some to be able to watch or may be concerning for those who suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is perhaps the strangest movie you’ll see all year. It’s surely the only movie I’ve ever seen where the protagonist is occasionally a piñata or a rock with googly eyes and sometimes sports hot dogs for fingers. And I definitely never expected a movie with those elements to be about, at its root, philosophical questions on the nature of existence.

As Evelyn travels from universe to universe, she finds herself experiencing all of the directions her life could have gone had she taken a different path—if she never married her husband Waymond or had learned martial arts, for example. And in every instance, she discovers that those versions of her have, on the surface, much better lives than she does (yes, even the Evelyn who has hot dogs for fingers).

It’s enough to make Evelyn want to just abandon her past life and go live in one of those other universes. The quality of her life would dramatically increase, it would seem. If you can be anything, anywhere, why would you ever stay in a universe that contains not only all of your failures and flaws, but also the failures and flaws of others? And not only that, but if there are infinite universes and infinite possibilities, does anything really matter in the end—or is it all, as Jobu Tupaki tells us, a meaningless mess of chaos with only a few seconds of occasional clarity?

They’re questions Evelyn grapples with, often swinging one way and another. And as she thinks about how to answer them, she reminds us of the value of marriage and family as she goes, continuously fighting for her father, husband and daughter through her journey. And through all the punches thrown and kicks, well, kicked, we realize that just because a universe is full of pain and hardship doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a life worth living.

Of course, to get to that conclusion, Evelyn must also dive into a movie more loaded with more unsavory content than an everything bagel. This multiverse is filled with various sexual themes and gags of both the homosexual and heterosexual variety, harsh swear words and plenty of violent content. In addition, the sheer strangeness factor of the movie may be a bit too strange for some, and a couple scenes with bright flashing lights may be hard for some to sit through.

In one of Evelyn’s universes, this movie is able to tell all those positive messages without the addition of these content concerns. Unfortunately, we aren’t in the right one.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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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 is a multiverse masterpiece

Daniels’ gripping, hilarious fantasy rivals The Matrix for game-changing effects and ambition

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by Tasha Robinson

It’s just about impossible to overemphasize the winking vulgarity of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s work together as the filmmaking collective Daniels. Their first feature film, Swiss Army Man , saw Paul Dano riding the farting corpse of Daniel Radcliffe to freedom and glory. Their best-known music video, for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “ Turn Down for What ,” has Kwan feeling the beat so hard that his crotch smashes through walls and ceilings, infecting the breasts and asses of everyone who sees him with similar destructive energy. In their short film Interesting Ball , a cosmic event results in Scheinert being bodily sucked up into Kwan’s rectum. Their imagery is often joyously crude, and almost always startling, as they go places most creators wouldn’t dare.

But at the same time, it’s just as difficult to overemphasize the humanistic messages their work embraces. All these projects have people finding a strangely compelling, life-affirming power in the weird, gross places the world takes them. Swiss Army Man in particular is downright startling in the depth of its thoughts on cynicism, existentialism, and the meaning of human connection. Daniels’ latest project, the wild martial-arts multiverse fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once , continues the trend with bloody murder-dildos, weaponized snot, and a fast-paced, hilarious anal-insertion war. But it’s also an achingly honest examination of despair, cynicism, anger, and ennui, all leading up to a message that’s all the more moving because before it asserts that life is worth living, it stares deep into the abyss, considering all the reasons why people might think otherwise.

Everything Everywhere ’s plot is best discovered in the moment, since it unfolds with a speed and verve that converts every new revelation into a fresh jolt of electricity. It’s enough to say that martial-arts superstar Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Wang, an overstretched first-generation Chinese immigrant who owns a laundromat with her amiable husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), but barely has time for him or their frustrated adult daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) amid her day-to-day business struggles.

Among other things, the laundromat is being audited by humorless IRS agent Deirdre (a thoroughly disguised Jamie Lee Curtis), just as Evelyn is trying to impress her contemptuous visiting father, Gong Gong (James Hong). Meanwhile, Joy is trying to get Evelyn to acknowledge Joy’s girlfriend Becky, and Waymond is trying to get Evelyn to acknowledge him at all. When Evelyn is informed that she’s the key to fighting a vast evil that threatens the entire multiverse, her knee-jerk response is a distracted, exasperated “very busy today, no time to help you.”

When the threat catches up with her anyway, Everything Everywhere absolutely explodes into a series of creatively staged, comically over-the-top battles, a trip through different timelines and realities, and a staggeringly fast-paced series of personal explorations and revelations. The worlds Evelyn accesses are silly, sad, or strange, but none of them challenge her as much as the things she’s missed out on understanding about herself, her family, and her own past and future.

This is a movie that operates at the revved-up pace of stories like Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or the recent animated Oscar nominee The Mitchells vs. the Machines , with the characters dragged breathlessly from one manic action sequence to the next. And yet Kwan and Scheinert keep finding small, quiet pockets where Evelyn can consider how she’s let herself and other people down, what she owes them, and what she can still offer them. For a movie that frequently throws Evelyn through realities and through walls and windows, it’s admirably focused on her well-being and her understanding of herself. And more than that, it’s focused on understanding how people inevitably limit their possible futures whenever they make choices, and how meaningless life can look after a series of choices goes wrong.

Everything Everywhere ’s multiverse is a remarkably flexible metaphor. It’s suitable for expressing some common frustrations the audience may relate to, about botched choices and wasted opportunity. But it’s just as suited for setting up a series of ridiculously kickass action sequences where literally anything is possible, because the characters aren’t bound by reality or causality. Kwan and Scheinert use that central idea of the multiverse to let their characters change bodies, costumes, skills, and settings on the fly, in ways that are visually dazzling and even overwhelming. But they set it all up with a clarity of thought and intention that make it surprisingly easy — and thrilling — to follow.

And even as they’re focusing on the big picture of a million universes collapsing around a single predatory evil, they’re just as aware of the smaller picture. So much of this story is told with tiny, telling details, like the way Joy nervously, wordlessly rolls her girlfriend’s sleeves down to cover her tattoos before trying to introduce her to Gong Gong. Or the way Waymond wistfully watches two older Chinese people at the IRS exchanging a demure kiss, and clearly longs for the same kind of tenderness in his life. Above all else, the Daniels trust their viewers to keep up with the story even when these kinds of grace notes are blurring by at warp speed, without explanation or underlining.

Everything Everywhere All at Once operates in a pop culture universe filled with familiar detritus for genre fans: a little Douglas Adams absurdity here, a visual quote or concept or line or mood cribbed from a wealth of other movies there. But while the Daniels quote 2001: A Space Odyssey in one scene and The Terminator in another, the movie’s biggest touchpoint is The Matrix , and not just because Evelyn discovers, to her surprise, that she knows kung fu.

In spite of a long series of Matrix sequels and re-quels , ripoffs and copycats, this is the first movie that authentically feels as surprising, daring, and outright game-changing as the Wachowskis’ 1999 original. The special effects, with that kaleidoscopic approach to shifting forms, look as radical now as bullet time was when it first arrived. The movie’s heady deconstructive philosophy of the universe feels as ambitious and radical as The Matrix ’s Gnostic take on reality did back then. And the martial-arts combat, carefully positioned between impressively choreographed and openly silly, feels as radical as it ever has in a Jackie Chan or Woo-Ping Yuen choreographed fight.

But where The Matrix is entirely caught up in its own sense of airless cool, in its humorless cybertech-Gothic aesthetic and love of kickass tableaux, Everything Everywhere has a sense of play and humor that helps make all the existential philosophy go down more smoothly. One effect of that warp-speed storytelling is that the film sometimes slingshots from pathos to punchlines, then back again, quickly enough to induce whiplash. But in this anything-goes environment, the shifts don’t feel like tonal contradictions. They just feel like an acknowledgment that life is simultaneously painful and absurd, and that the tension between the two helps define the sensation of being human.

The cast is just stellar. Ke Huy Quan — Short Round in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies — may be the biggest revelation in the cast, with a demanding role that has him switching affects and personalities repeatedly throughout the film, while maintaining that gentle longing throughout. But the Daniels demand a lot of all of their cast, and Yeoh, Hsu, Hong, and Curtis are up to the movie’s deeply weird challenges. (Jenny Slate and Glee ’s Harry Shum Jr. also show up in minor roles that no one’s likely to forget.) Like all of Kwan and Scheinert’s projects, Everything Everywhere is distinctive, both in its big ambitions and its subversive grossness. No one else makes movies like this. Possibly no one else would even want to.

That can be a little sad to consider — even in a multiverse of endless possibility, we’re unlikely to see a movie like this again. But at the same time, it means that every moment of Everything Everywhere is an exciting unknown. There’s no predicting where a Daniels project will travel in any given moment: up a character’s ass, or off into their wildest dreams. Sometimes it’s both at once. The miracle is that Scheinert and Kwan make it all feel natural, even when they’re going places no one else could imagine.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is now playing in major cities, with a nationwide rollout beginning on April 8.

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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.

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‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Review: Michelle Yeoh’s Insane Multiverse Comedy Lives Up to Its Name

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In Swiss Army Man , the debut film from Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (collectively and fitting known as Daniels), Hank ( Paul Dano ) and his corpse friend Manny ( Daniel Radcliffe ) shoot out of a river propelled on the power of Manny’s farts. As they fly through the air, they sing a song to each other that goes: “You just have to remember that we’re all here for a purpose, and the Universe picks its time. Everything, everywhere matters to everything.” While Swiss Army Man only lightly touched on this idea, six years later, Daniels’ second film Everything Everywhere All At Once almost makes this verse a mantra amongst a cavalcade of insane multiverses, unlimited possibilities, and endless creativity. Daniels has given audiences a wholly unique vision that literally feels like everything everywhere all at once.

Leading this trip is Evelyn Wang ( Michelle Yeoh at maybe her all-time best), who runs a struggling laundromat with her overly-optimistic husband Waymond (an equally fantastic Ke Huy Quan ). When we first meet Evelyn, she’s surrounded by receipts, thanks to the laundromat getting audited, her husband is putting googly-eyes on bags of laundry, and it doesn’t take long for Evelyn to embarrass her daughter, Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ) when introducing her girlfriend to Evelyn’s father, Gong Gong ( James Hong ). To make matters worse, Evelyn doesn’t know Waymond has divorce papers, and IRS inspector Diedre (a hilariously wild Jamie Lee Curtis ) accuses the laundromat of fraud. As someone tells Evelyn later in the film, Evelyn is living her worst you.

But that’s not to say Evelyn hasn’t tried to escape her monotonous life. We learn she’s wanted to be a singing coach and an author, amongst other interests that became hobbies instead of life-altering careers. But Evelyn’s life irrevocably changes when a version of Waymond tells Evelyn that she is just one of many Evelyns, yet she’s the only one that can defeat a powerful villain named Jobu Tupaki, who could destroy all the universes (and there are a lot of universes).

RELATED: 'Everything Everywhere All At Once', 'I Love My Dad' Among Winners at SXSW Festival

Daniels turns Everything Everywhere All At Once a frenetic and truly ridiculous barrage of probabilities and multiverse jumping. Anything you can imagine, Daniels has also thought of and thrown into this film. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a bombardment of hot dog fingers, googly-eyes, Wong Kar-Wai homages, fanny packs incredibly strong pinkie fingers, talking rocks, the Nine Days song “Absolutely (Story of a Girl),” raccoons, the guy who played Santa Claus in I Think You Should Leave , and butt plugs. And like Swiss Army Man says: everything everywhere matters to everything.

Part of the brilliance of Everything Everywhere All At Once is the remarkable amount of ideas Daniels can cram into this story without it becoming an absurd mess. However crazy you’re thinking a story can get—triple it. There are no restraints, no stops, no idea too wild that doesn’t make it into Everything Everywhere . And while at times, the film can almost feel suffocatingly overwhelming, it’s all part of the bigger plan, an everything bagel of probabilities.

Amongst this film that flies by so fast, it should have an epilepsy warning, is an extremely touching story about the paths we take in our lives, the paths that we didn’t take, and how they lead us to exactly where we need to be. Again, this is coming from the two directors that made a guy’s friendship with a dead body a truly moving story. Daniels can make anything (and everything) happen.

Key to this narrative are the performances by Yeoh, Quan, and Hsu. With so many versions of these characters running around this multiverse of madness, these three are able to meet any challenge that the Daniels throw at them—whether a star-crossed lover-type story, a Pixar parody, or some of the most entertaining fight scenes in recent memory. As the grounding force of Everything Everywhere , Yeoh is simply incredible, as no matter what incarnation of Evelyn we see her in, Yeoh always brings that original Evelyn’s aspirations, attitude, and fears with her. Also tremendous is Quan, the gigantic beating heart of the film, who gives an earnest, hilarious, and emotional performance, and Hsu, who has to be both extremely vulnerable and one of the biggest threats to the universe at the same time—not an easy task.

With Everything Everywhere All At Once , Daniels is touching on many of the same concepts they tried to tackle with Swiss Army Man , just in a more bonkers way with a larger scope. Everything Everywhere has to be as nutso as it is to prove its point: when everything is possible, what truly matters? While the third act can occasionally seem weight down by Daniels’ script attempting to hit all the grander points they’re trying to make, it all comes together in the end if you’re willing to take the ride. On the way, Daniels explores the hopelessness of depression, the little miracles that truly make life worthwhile, how acts of kindness can be an extraordinary asset, and—most fitting to this film—how it’s OK to be a mess.

If Daniels had said they had spent the six years since Swiss Army Man filming Everything Everywhere All At Once and putting together this awe-inspiring world, it would make perfect sense. It’s rare that a film crams as much into it as this one does, yet without feeling overstuffed or ridiculous for the sake of being audacious. There’s a real determination and intention to every chaotic choice, a method to this madness that ultimately makes Everything Everywhere All At Once one of the most ambitious and ballsy films in recent years—maybe even ever. Daniels try to cram everything everywhere all at once into Everything Everywhere All At Once , and I’ll be damned, they accomplished that goal with brilliance and style.

Read more about Everything, Everywhere All at Once:

'everything everywhere all at once' ending explained: complicated, compelling, bagels, 'everything everywhere all at once': everything (everywhere) you need to know how to watch 'everything everywhere all at once': is the a24 film in theaters, how ‘everything everywhere all at once’ uses the multiverse to explore character growth, the daniels on ‘everything everywhere all at once’, their unique process, and how the russo brothers produced the movie, james hong, stephanie hsu, and ke huy quan on ‘everything everywhere all at once’ and how the film is modern art, michelle yeoh & jamie lee curtis on ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ the daniels, and how they filmed the movie in 30-something days, how 'everything everywhere all at once' earns its kindness and optimism, how ‘everything everywhere all at once’ subverts the action movie climax.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Reviews

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

... Touches upon important themes such as control through technology, media, food, and body while resorting to an anarchic and hilarious sense of humor. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 28, 2023

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Everything Everywhere All at Once Perfects Optimistic Nihilism

In 2012, the legendary Twitter account @horse_ebooks tweeted, “ Everything happens so much. " Despite bordering on nonsense, the message singularly captured the feeling of exhaustion that comes with trying to keep up with the flood of inputs that demand attention every day. It is in this place of chaotic resignation that Everything Everywhere All at Once steps in to offer clarity.

Everything Everywhere , the latest from the directing duo known as Daniels ( Swiss Army Man ), centers on Evelyn (played in dozens of incarnations by Michelle Yeoh), a woman who's just trying to file her taxes to keep the laundromat she owns with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), running. Her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), wants to bring her girlfriend to the birthday party for Evelyn's elderly father (James Hong), who's old-fashioned and won't approve of their relationship. All the while, Waymond is struggling to find the space to tell Evelyn that he wants a divorce. It's frenetically told but also unfolds like a perfectly relatable story about the chaos of life and the feeling of being pulled in a thousand directions at once. And then the multiverse opens up.

Stories about multiverses are myriad in popular culture. For proof, one need look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Ironically, Daniels—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert— turned down the opportunity to work on Loki , which dealt heavily in multiversal possibilities .) But rarely are they explored as in-depth and meaningfully as they are in Everything Everywhere . Evelyn's foray into her multiverse gives her perspective, a chance to reconcile her boring job, whiny husband, and troublesome daughter with versions of her life in which she's a hibachi chef, movie star, and—in a twist—a literal rock. Equal parts soul-searching and sci-fi, Kwan and Scheinert's movie takes all of this to its emotional and logical extremes. But instead of arriving at some nihilistic conclusion, it poses a more optimistic question: If there are no rules, no consequences, then why not go wild?

Absurdity courses through every scene. Navigation of the multiverse involves performing silly, random actions like eating lip balm or accepting an award, and each time Evelyn or a member of her family makes a decision, another timeline branches off. The point is that seemingly small or inconsequential decisions can lead to radically different outcomes. Throughout Everything Everywhere , characters perform ridiculous actions in order to gain new abilities, but in the end it's the minuscule and unlikely ones that ultimately change the course of the party Evelyn throws for her father. 

At the onset, it's easy to see why Evelyn is frustrated with her job, her husband, her daughter. But after seeing the many ways their lives could have unfolded, the countless possibilities of who they could have become, a deeper truth emerges. If nothing matters, then the only thing that can matter is what you choose. The multiverse might contain an infinite amount of pain and heartbreak, but it also contains an infinite amount of creativity, passion, beauty, and connection. 

Through that lens, cynicism itself gets distilled down to just another choice. It's not naive or ignorant to choose to value little moments, small acts of kindness. In a world where so much can feel insignificant, choosing cruelty or hopelessness has no greater value than opting for kindness and empathy. If anything, choosing destruction only accelerates entropy.

Everything Everywhere doesn't just reject cynicism, it refutes it. And that might be its most defining value. The film takes the concept of an infinite multiverse—and by extension, the vast, overwhelming nature of our own experiences—and examines it both critically and compassionately. It, quite literally at times, stares into the void and doesn't blink as the void stares back.

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Movie Reviews

Review: 'everything everywhere all at once' is as encouraging as it is on-point.

Bob Mondello

A Chinese-American businesswoman travels the multiverse in the comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once by the filmmaking duo Daniels, made up of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

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Ambitious, Outrageous Everything Everywhere All at Once Is All That and More

To say that Everything Everywhere All at Once takes big swings is a profound understatement. This movie’s swings proliferate wildly and take their own swings, which then give birth to thousands more swings, all of which drop acid together and explode in a display of fireworks (which may or may not involve butt plugs).

In the race to make the most meta piece of entertainment of all time, the competition is fierce. (Before the screening of Everything Everywhere I attended, there was a preview of the upcoming movie in which Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage). But thanks to an extraordinary cast and an emotional undertow that proves irresistible, Everything Everywhere ends up being — if you can ride all those big swings — satisfyingly bonkers. Or bonkersly satisfying. I am not sure the latter phrase is grammatically correct, but this movie may have broken my brain.

I have no complaints on that score, because the incandescent Michelle Yeoh , making the most of the roles of a lifetime, did much of the breaking. That choice of the word “roles,” by the way, was not an error: Yeoh plays an astonishing array of versions of one woman, and these filmmakers understood she was the only woman on Earth that could have made this batshit ride actually work.

Although, confession time: Did I love the scenes of her with hotdogs where her fingers should be as much as directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinart clearly did? I did not. But Everything Everywhere is that kind of movie. It’s a lot on top of a lot, and then more is piled on top of that concatenation of concepts. You’re unlikely to vibe with every element of it, but never mind: because before you know it, it’s sprinting on to the next thing. Anyway, the kindest thing to do at this point would be to pause and let you have a moment to process the concept of “hotdog fingers.” If it’s any consolation, they end up being one of the least weird elements of the film. I really want to tell you about the desolate cliff where a [blank] talks to a [blank] – a truly lovely moment in which the film slows down to let you catch your breath – or the scene in which a vengeful woman beats a man with [blanks], but I also don’t want to spoil too much of its exuberant loopiness.

Everything Everywhere is certainly a very 2022 movie, in that its characters are often overwhelmed, confused and rarely sure that linear time exists anymore (and if it does… ehnnnnh ? Does it matter?). That’s not to say that the main character, Evelyn (Yeoh), allows herself the luxury of feeling exhausted. There is too much to do in her personal life and in the struggling laundry she runs with her earnest husband, Waymond ( Ke Huy Quan ). The first half of the film spends a lot of time laying out the strange things that happen to Evelyn and her family, and the rules (“rules”??) of how it all works. Suffice to say that she is, in spite of the humdrum nature of her existence, a crucial Chosen One destined to fight a titanic battle. Out of a vast multiverse of Evelyns — a film star, a chef, a martial arts expert and so on — the overworked Evelyn, the one just trying to plan a party for her dad ( James Hong ), is the One who must defeat an equally powerful foe. Due to the laundry’s tax issues, a good deal of that battle takes place inside a truly cursed IRS office.

A lesser actor would have used this expansive Into the Spiderverse meets Inception meets Airplane! premise to go broad and abandon subtlety. But the directors and Yeoh understand that the audience won’t buy into any of it unless Evelyn — all the Evelyns — are real, textured, intelligent people. The main Evelyn is not always likable and not always able to truly see her husband and her daughter Joy ( Stephanie Hsu ). This is largely because she’s allowed herself to be swallowed up by her responsibilities, which distract her, at least some of the time, from her lack of self-confidence and hope. (And that may be the most impressive trick of Everything Everywhere — that Yeoh could believably play a woman in her flop era).

One might wish for some streamlining here or there; some exposition is ungainly, and there are uneven moments that emanate the shaggy, indulgent bravado of ambitious film students fresh off a powerful bong hit. But arriving at some kind of acceptance — making peace with things that can be flawed, overstuffed, yet delicious — is a theme that percolates through Everything Everywhere .

A lot of sad movies underscore the fact that our existences can be mind-meltingly hard, and reality can feel, at times, like a tornado of confusion — one that makes it hard to figure out how to find moments of meaning, grace, truth or love. This movie uses absurdity to explore those ideas, but when it’s on its A-game — and with this cast, it often is — it’s anything but grim. How could it be, when it’s paying homage to classic Hong Kong action cinema and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at the same time?

Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve and growing curiosity. She’s the kind of woman the world (and Hollywood) routinely overlooks, but Yeoh makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping. Quan, a former child star, plays multiple iterations of his own character as well, and he is stunningly effective as quite different versions of Wayland (all of whom possess a similar spark of steadfast integrity). In every reality, he holds his own with Yeoh; if he doesn’t get a ton more work after this, Hollywood has failed us all.

There are deliriously bizarre martial arts battles and hotdog fingers; one page of my notes just says “good raccoon stuff.” Everything Everywhere All at Once is not for everyone, but within ten minutes, you’ll know if it’s for you. I will admit to a weakness for projects that, when you describe them, you sound like you’ve taken leave of your senses — but only if that wild abandon and imaginative momentum is tied to something deeper and richer. Everything Everywhere’s final-act swerve into emotionally charged territory works like gangbusters, thanks to vulnerable, deeply impressive work by Quan, Yeoh and Hsu. (Hong steals almost every scene he’s in, but of course, that’s par for the course for him.)

I can’t sum up this movie — and that’s a feature, not a bug. But I can say that Everything Everywhere is at least partly about not letting the forces of cynicism, isolation and hopelessness win. At the core of this wildly ambitious thrill ride, there are quite accessible ideas about connection, change and love. Those may be cornball (hotdog?) sentiments. But it is not for this lowly mortal to tell Michelle Yeoh she’s wrong.

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