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.