Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) review

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the new film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka "Daniels," the directing duo behind Swiss Army Man from 2016. The film follows Evelyn Wang, who gets pulled into a bizarre adventure through different universes, experiencing different versions of her life and forcing her to reevaluate her relationships with her father, her husband and most importantly, her daughter, all while her laundromat gets audited by the IRS.

I’ll just say it and get it out of the way nice and quick: Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the best, if not the best movie of the decade so far by a mile. It’s basically everything that I could possibly want from a movie. It is a meticulously crafted, hilarious, stunning, beautiful, action packed masterpiece with an incredibly unique personality that could not have been created by anyone other than Daniels. It’s one of those movies that is hard to talk about without just finding different ways to say that it’s damn near a perfect movie. It does the “multiverse” concept in the most satisfying way I can imagine it being done, so much so that Marvel can fuck right off and just not release that stupid looking Dr. Strange movie.

The film combines elements of The Matrix and Inception with the unique personality of Daniels previous work, as well as improving upon aspects of all three. Despite pulling clear influence from films that focus on science fiction concepts like multiverses, dreams and simulations, Everything Everywhere All at Once never falls into any pitfalls that those films fell into. Where Inception feels like the characters are incidental and only there to explore the science-fiction concept and world, making their arcs feel forced, Evelyn and her relationships with her family are so integral to the story that the plot of the movie literally could not occur without them. Where the character dynamics and relationships are the least resonant part of The Matrix franchise, each character in Everything Everywhere All at Once is perfectly nuanced and explored at every possible angle, making the whole experience much more relatable, satisfying and well-rounded.

Each member of the cast gives career best performances, from Michelle Yeoh to Jamie Lee Curtis, all transform into fully realized characters to such a degree that I stopped seeing the actors and just saw the characters. Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn joins the select group of fictional characters performed and written so well that they feel a little too much like a real person, alongside Toni Collette as Annie in Hereditary and Adam Sandler as Barry in Punch-Drunk Love.

Like Swiss Army Man, it deals with extremely heavy themes kept in balance by Daniels sense of humor, this time revolving around parenting and reflection on the direction Evelyn’s life went. As funny and unrelentingly entertaining as the movie is, at its’ core is a gut-wrenchingly sad and human look at the central family. The film depicts the most realistic and honest look at familial relationships since Hereditary and Marriage Story. Things are said between Evelyn and her husband and Evelyn and her daughter that cannot be unsaid or forgotten, and are heart-breaking to hear someone say, even a fictional character. It deals with dark concepts, but the tone of the movie never allows the movie to feel nihilistic about the depressing and sometimes existential ideas it communicates. Instead of wallowing in the problems it communicates and getting bogged down by them, Everything Everywhere All at Once offers a fresh perspective on them. The movie knows that its premise is a batshit insane and inherently a goofy idea, allowing itself to go hog-wild and incorporate bizarre humor into the story, resulting in creative solutions to the films central conflicts, unforgettable action scenes and heartfelt character moments between Evelyn and her family as she tries to solve all the problems she has inadvertently caused in dozens of different universes.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of those wonderful movies that comes around every few years where nearly every single action and line of dialogue is reincorporated in a way that makes thinking about, analyzing and re-watching the movie a rewarding experience that I cannot wait to watch again and again. It is so damn well written and constructed that the Academy won’t even think about considering it for any awards and if that isn’t a mark of quality, I don’t know what is.

Go watch it.