Everything Everywhere All at Once: Michelle Yeoh Hops the Multiverse in a Joyously Insane Ode to Life, Consequences

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A+

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a sci-fi/fantasy/martial arts action movie on steroids: a cuckoo-bananas story about life and love and family and humanity and a bunch of other things… all at once.

This goes with the territory with a frenetically absurdist movie built around the multiverse and a giant “everything” bagel that is really a black hole. Think Deadpool only faster, more irreverent and more intense.  

Driven by a superb performance by Michelle Yeoh, Everything is likely to end up the year’s wonkiest movie, and one of its most satisfying. More than that, with its mix of insanity and joy, it is a tonic for these times.

Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang: wife, mother, and co-owner of a laundromat and cleaning business with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). She’s exhausted, and terminally unhappy.  To her family, she’s hostile, caustic, toxic.

When we first meet her, she’s sitting at the family’s dining room table, trying to make sense of a stack of receipts, in preparation for an IRS audit meeting later that day. She’s frazzled, and when Waymond tries to talk to her about something serious, she shuts him down.

Adding to Evelyn’s stress level, her stern father (played by the venerable James Hong) is visiting from China. He disapproved of her marriage and still does. Evelyn remains determined to impress him by throwing a party in the laundromat for her father and their clients. 

And then there’s Evelyn’s tense relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who has come out as gay, and wants her mother to acknowledge, in front of her grandfather, that her girlfriend is her romantic partner.

But Evelyn is so tightly wound that she can’t make herself say anything nice to Joy. She’s stuck in her emotional groove.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the audit. On the elevator up to the appointment, the gentle Waymond abruptly changes personality.  He goes full secret agent, explaining quickly that he’s not her actual husband, but a version of him from another timeline, the Alphaverse. 

He’s been searching the multiverse to find the right version of her, the version that, for a very specific reasons, is best suited to save everyone from an ultimate evil. Jobu Tupaki  is a  creature whose only aim is chaos, and the end of existence. 

Thus begins Evelyn’s manic universe-hop, acquiring skills, aided by weird tech and strange instructions. All this, and she still has to face her tax audit, managed by a humourless, juice-pack-slurping IRS agent named Deirdre Beaubeirda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (at her least glamorous ever).  Deirdre isn’t a monster, at least not in this timeline, but she’s pretty scary and demanding.

The movie takes off at a million miles an hour, dashing through the multiverse, as a group in a crowded trailer, working with Waymond, keep track of Evelyn, aiming to link her to the one universe that will equip her to battle whatever the hell is in front of her. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once was co-written and co-directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a.k.a. “the Daniels,” who have been collaborating for about a decade on everything from viral music videos, to commercials, to the critically acclaimed audacious absurdist film Swiss Army Man, in which Daniel Radcliffe played a flatulent corpse.  

They’ve set themselves a gargantuan challenge with Everything Everywhere All at Once, moving their characters through locations, often at breakneck speed, throwing ideas at us, some absolutely nuts, without losing track of the basic story and what it’s all adding up to. And yes, it does all add up to something.

The pacing alone is a feat—often moving so quickly we see seconds of a scene, as if we were flipping through a picture book of Evelyn in various timelines. Occasionally, it settles to let the story linger, to give us insight into Evelyn and her relationships.

And that means the key characters show up with different relationships to each other, in different modes, sometimes as antagonists, sometimes as romantic interests, sometimes as inanimate objects, and sometimes as humans with absurd appendages. 

I won’t kid you. There were times when I wondered about the taste level, where I thought WTF?!  At other times, I just admired the insane imagination in every frame. 

I suspect that the pacing will drive some people mad.  But hang in. 

The magic here is how the directors and their team manage to get us through the complex multiverses and utter madness, without losing the plot. And what a team! The costumes. The designs. And holy cow, the editing. Give editor Paul Rogers the Oscar right now. Everything fires on all pistons here.

Everything also answers the question:  What can’t Michelle Yeoh do?  The answer is nothing. She can do it all. And the film demands that she do it all: from comedy, to drama, to romance, to glamour, to a lack of glamour, to martial arts.  

As well, I can’t say enough about the cast, who give this film the right tone from timeline to timeline and character to character, with heart and the right mix of emotion and straight faces (which is especially important at this level of absurdity). 

The Daniels clearly want us to have fun. But they are actually saying something. As Evelyn moves through the multiverse, meeting versions of herself who have taken different life paths with different consequences, she starts to see things differently in her timeline: The woman with the disappointing life, the laundry business, the soft-hearted husband, the stubborn and determined daughter, the rejecting father. 

Underneath all the craziness and chaos, through Evelyn, the Daniels are getting at something deeper here, something sweet beautiful and universal.  

That they stick the landing is part of the little miracle of this insanely imaginative film, with its message about life’s messiness. It is the film’s greatest joy.

Everything Everywhere All at Once. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong and Jenny Slate. Opens in Toronto and Vancouver April 1, expanding April 8.