Review - Everything Everywhere All At Once

Directed by: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Written by: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr
Running Time: 139 minutes
Rating: 5/5

There is a universe out there where the Daniels are capable of making a bad movie. Fortunately that universe doesn’t seem to be ours as Everything Everywhere All at Once is nothing short of a modern masterpiece.

The sci-fi black comedy is a carefully crafted film, with one of the tightest screenplays you will ever encounter. The Daniels have a gorilla grip over the story they want to tell and it shows. Nothing you see is a throwaway line, or visual gag. The movie sees main character Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) struggle under the weight of family and professional stress until the cracks begin to show. Except these cracks are an invitation into the multiverse where multiple copies of all the main characters share the spotlight in a beautiful story of finding purpose and overcoming intergenerational trauma. It’s Turning Red meets the Multiverse of Madness but elevated to an A24 new classic.

It’s impossible to not talk about Michelle Yeoh’s stellar performance. She carries an incredibly complex story without missing a beat. She fights, she sings, she laughs, she cries. Yeoh could do Devil Wears Prada but Meryl Streep couldn’t do Everything Everywhere All At Once. In fact, I don’t think anyone but Yeoh could do what’s required in this film. It will be a true test of the award season to see what, if any, hardware she’s able to collect. If the major awards are incapable of recognizing good work when it came out too far before the ceremony, then their value will be put into serious question. Especially when it comes to a performance like this in a movie like this.

And although Yeoh’s acting is a step above anything else you will see this year, amazing work is also done by the rest of the cast, especially Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang (Evelyn’s Husband) and Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang (Evelyn’s daughter).

“The Daniels instead are building on all the blocks that are already there. They are creating new stories with a language we’ve all taken the time to learn”

All this praise should be of little surprise to anyone familiar with the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man where they were able to show themselves to be true swiss army knives when it comes to directing. But this talent is just spotlighted further when watching Everything Everywhere All At Once. The transitions from wuxia to comedy to sci-fi are seamless. In a recent interview, the Daniels spoke about their current output being a product of who they were and the time they were able to be, speaking of the work they were able to create in the then-nascent YouTube and Vimeo communities. The investments in these communities by their participants is reaping rewards for the film industry at large as these communities in turn are now being leveraged to reinvent the film landscape for the better. The VFX are stellar, the editing is crisp, the set design is unequivocal.

Iit’s not just the talent that is worth noting when it comes to the up-and-coming Daniels (age-wise of course, talent-wise they’ve very much arrived). Instead, I’d focus on the message they seem to have when it comes to film creation. While many of the old guard are strong gatekeepers of the traditional form and what constitutes a good movie, or how movies and film are different; the Daniels instead are building on all the blocks that are already there. They are creating new stories with a language we’ve all taken the time to learn. They can just as easily see the value in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as they do in Ratatouille or X-Men. They are able to weave in complex concepts like multiversal travel because of the legwork that movies like The Matrix, the DCEU or the MCU have already put in. They don’t waste time in trying to make an unnecessary distinction between high brow or low brow films. They just use both to springboard into perfection.

This movie, just like the name suggests, does feel like everything everywhere all at once. But it’s grounded in purpose. It’s grounded in storytelling. It’s a modern achievement in film and we need to recognize it as such.

There’s a universe where we don’t, as a film community, recognize the importance of a movie like this. Go out and watch this movie in theatres so we can make damn sure that universe isn’t ours.