At the exact moment Everything Everywhere All At Once is about to kick into overdrive, Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn reads a vital piece of advice: “P.S. Don’t forget to breathe.” Really, it’s a missive to the audience — a necessary heads-up to, in the words of Jurassic Park’s Mr Arnold, hold onto your butts. Because once it starts, it rarely stops — an all-out cinematic assault, a cacophony of creativity that dazzles, delights, and defies explanation with every passing second. Leaving you breathless is its entire MO.
Anyone who saw the first film from Daniels (that’s writer-director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Swiss Army Man, would expect as much. The pair’s feature debut was the infamous ‘Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse’ movie — a film whose seemingly crass premise belied its surprisingly reflective ruminations on life, death and companionship. It’s impressive enough that Daniels have created a follow-up that, in its most out-there moments — and there are plenty of those — is just as jaw-droppingly wild; take a drink every time Everything Everywhere All At Once delivers something you’ve never seen on screen before, and you’d black out long before the closing credits. But more miraculous is that, once again, they balance the ‘did they actually just do that?’ moments with such spectacular emotion, enriching the soul while confounding the senses. This is a Daniels film — the intersection of the profane and the profound is their comfort zone.
It is thunderously cinematic, revelling in the simplicity of filmmaking’s most basic tools, while deploying them to their maximum potential.
So much of that emotional depth comes from the fact that, beneath the multiversal mayhem, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family story. Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a laundromat with husband Waymond (The Goonies and Temple Of Doom star Ke Huy Quan, back on our screens at last), is primarily a woman teetering towards existential crisis. There is specificity in her story. But there is universality in the way that she feels — overwhelmed by the relentlessness of her life, consumed by everything, everywhere, all at once. She has a business to run, taxes to file, customers to please, a father to live up to, a husband to argue with, and — most importantly — a daughter she increasingly cannot relate to. Subsequently, she’s closed off, trapped under the weight of her failed hopes and dreams, struggling to perpetuate a life she has no passion for. It’s a set-up expertly established in a claustrophobic opening reel, set in the cramped chaos of the Wang home — a taut ticking-clock of noise, motion and clashing conversations, radiating Uncut Gems-style stress.
It’s so compelling, you almost don’t want the sci-fi stuff to intrude. But when it does, it does so spectacularly, Waymond’s ‘Alphaverse’ self opening Evelyn’s mind to alternate universes in which she’s all the things she ever wanted to be: a singer, a chef, an action-movie star. With multiversal evil Jobu Tupaki (“an agent of pure chaos”) threatening to bring everything to an end, it’s up to Evelyn to ‘Verse-Jump’ into her other life-paths and tap into those skills to fight back. What follows are pulse-pounding martial-arts brawls to rival The Matrix and The Raid, gonzo expeditions into bizarro alt-dimensions (hot-dog hands, anyone?), and delightfully bonkers riffs on everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ratatouille to In The Mood For Love. In its more existential second half, the film tugs deeply on those familial threads, espousing joy and connectivity as necessary forces to combat nihilism.
The magic of Everything Everywhere All At Once is in its title — within it, you’ll find every genre, experience every emotion. It’s both a reflection of, and an oasis from, the incessant overstimulation of 21st-century life. So many films would collapse in on themselves under that kind of pressure. EEAAO never does. It is thunderously cinematic, revelling in the simplicity of filmmaking’s most basic tools, while deploying them to their maximum potential. And it is brilliantly performed — Stephanie Hsu is revelatory as the multifaceted Joy; Quan is astonishing in his cinematic comeback, an action master who’ll make your heart explode too; Jamie Lee Curtis has a blast exaggerating the monstrous physicality of a no-bullshit tax officer; and Yeoh is perfection, drawing on every skill from every role she’s ever played to bring Evelyn’s many lives to life.
This is a radical film, about radical love and radical acceptance. It’s the biggest-hearted movie you can imagine that also features someone being beaten to death with two massive, floppy dildos. You’ll goggle at the (literal) ballsiest fight scene ever committed to film. You’ll cry at a shot of two rocks. You’ll never look at a bagel the same way. Don’t forget to breathe.
