- UK release: May 2022
- Directors: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels) · Writers: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
- Studio / distributor: A24; IAC Films; AGBO
- Genre: Multiverse science fiction comedy drama / martial arts fantasy · Runtime: 139 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tomorrow Never Dies) as Evelyn Wang; Ke Huy Quan (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Goonies) as Waymond Wang; Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki; Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween, A Fish Called Wanda) as Deirdre Beaubeirdre
- Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 86% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the pair who bill themselves as the Daniels, arrived three years ago with Swiss Army Man, a film in which Daniel Radcliffe played a farting corpse used as a jet ski. That tells you most of what you need to know about their sensibility, and almost nothing about what they have done with it here. Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the multiverse, a device Marvel has spent the last year sanding into a marketing word, and uses it for something the studios never quite dare to: a film about a middle-aged immigrant woman, her tax return, and the daughter she is losing.
The setup
Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a failing laundrette with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is behind on her accounts, and is dreading both an audit and a visit from her exacting father. Halfway through a meeting with a tax inspector, Waymond is replaced by a sharper, stranger version of himself, who tells her that the fate of the multiverse rests on her and that she can borrow the skills of every other Evelyn who ever lived. From there the film fans out across countless parallel lives, all while staying tethered to a strip-lit office and a woman who just wants her family to hold together. The threat takes the form of Jobu Tupaki, a being who has seen every universe at once and concluded that nothing matters. I will leave who that is for you to find.
The cast
Michelle Yeoh has spent decades being the most capable person on any screen she is on, and the film knows it. It asks her to be tired, petty, frightened and tender, often within a single scene, and to do her own fighting on top of it. It is the fullest use anyone has made of her. Ke Huy Quan, the child star of The Temple of Doom and The Goonies who quietly left acting for years, returns as Waymond and walks off with the film’s heart: a man whose kindness reads as weakness until the script reveals it as the opposite. Stephanie Hsu has the hardest job, playing both a hurt daughter and a glitter-drenched agent of nihilism, and she holds the two together. Jamie Lee Curtis, prosthetic knuckles and all, throws herself into the tax inspector with the glee of someone who has waited a long time to be this unglamorous.
The craft
For a film this maximal, the craft is remarkably controlled. Larkin Seiple’s camera moves between drab realism and gonzo invention without ever losing you, and Paul Rogers’s editing, which has to cut between universes at a sprint, is the real feat: the film should be incoherent and is not. The Daniels shoot their action with a slapstick clarity that owes more to Hong Kong cinema and Jackie Chan than to the grey blur of most Western blockbusters, and they are unafraid to be silly, hot-dog fingers and a universe of sentient rocks included. Son Lux’s score holds the emotional line under all the noise. It is loud, busy and occasionally too pleased with itself, but the chaos is engineered rather than accidental.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is The Matrix, another film where a nobody learns the world is larger than they knew and downloads abilities on demand, and the Daniels clearly love it. But the truer relatives are smaller and stranger: Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which buried a real relationship inside a high-concept gimmick, and Swiss Army Man’s own willingness to be ridiculous and sincere in the same breath. Against Marvel’s Doctor Strange and its tidy, corporate multiverse, this is what the idea looks like when independent film-makers get hold of it with a fraction of the budget and ten times the nerve. It is the rare effects film where the effects are in service of a feeling rather than the other way round.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are close to unanimous, sitting at 93%, with the praise landing on the invention, the performances and the unexpected emotional weight. Audiences are a notch behind at 86%, and the gap is easy to read: some viewers find the first hour exhausting, the joke density too high, the everything-at-once promise taken a little too literally. Both reactions are fair. This is a film that asks a lot of your attention and occasionally mistakes more for better. The ones who go with it tend to come out moved; the ones who do not come out tired. I sit closer to the critics, with one reservation I will get to.
Verdict
This is invention of a kind we rarely see at this scale, and a genuinely tender film hiding inside the racket. Yeoh and Quan are wonderful, the action is a joy, and the family story underneath earns its ending honestly. My reservation is rewatchability. The surprise of the construction is a large part of the pleasure, and a film this frantic does not obviously invite a second sitting the way a tighter one would. I admire it more than I expect to return to it, which is the difference between a very good film and a great one for me. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, on general release from 13 May. Worth the big screen for the action alone.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to a near sweep at the following year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for the Daniels, and acting wins for Yeoh, Quan and Curtis, making it A24’s biggest awards success to date. It has settled into a reputation as the defining cult-to-mainstream crossover of its moment, and the second-viewing worry has softened as audiences have returned to it. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, sex references, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are scenes of strong violence, including bloody beatings and shootings, implied stabbings, as well as emphasis on the breaking of bones. Some scenes contain slow-motion bloody detail upon impact of weapons and bullets. Other violence includes highly stylised martial arts fight sequences.
Threat and horror: There are scenes of moderate, fantastical threat in which a woman is jolted from universe to universe.
Language: There is use of strong language (‘f**k’), accompanied by milder terms (‘bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘bullshit’, ‘piss’, ‘God’, ‘damn’ and ‘butt’).
Sex: There are strong visual sex references, including references to BDSM and sexual role-play. In one scene, a woman uses large dildos in a bloody beating; in another, it is implied that two men purposefully land on pointy objects, which are subsequently revealed sticking out from underneath their clothes.
Flashing / flickering lights: This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
