‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: The Daniels’ familial multiverse exploration
Forget fantasy epics and superhero tales, the movie multiverse is the latest cinematic trend. Born from Marvel’s popularisation of the narrative tool, as well as the bombardment of content and fake news, suggesting separate realities that seem more real than we each care to believe, multiverse stories follow characters who cross dimensions and timelines to discover an existential truth. Though many movies have used the trend before, no film has better grasped the concept’s potential than Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Known collectively as ‘Daniels’, the American directing duo have made a name for themselves as some of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers in contemporary Hollywood, with their second feature film coming six years after the release of the flatulent corpse comedy Swiss Army Man. Heightening the surrealism even more dramatically, Everything Everywhere All at Once tells of a Chinese-American immigrant Evelyn Quan who discovers that she has access to a parallel universe in which she can connect with alternate versions of herself. It is indeed as bonkers as it sounds.
Tossed into a multiverse adventure against her will, Quan’s ability becomes imperative as she is tasked with saving the entire multiverse from destruction at the hands of an omnipotent being called Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu). If this weren’t stressful enough for Evelyn, she must also deal with the end of her marriage to her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). On top of this chaos, she also faces the difficulty of raising her troubled teenage daughter Joy while traversing an interrogative audit by the IRS.
Thanks to the chaos of Daniels’ new movie, many genres and tropes are active within the aptly named Everything Everywhere All at Once, however, the breadth of these genres, stuffed into an over-gratuitous two hours and 15 minutes, forces the film to never properly tackle its themes with the rigour that we, as audience members, ought to expect.
A tender family drama takes centre stage, with the dynamic between Evelyn and her daughter becoming the heart and soul of the sprawling sci-fi. Though, despite the film’s desperate efforts, we cannot delve into the dynamic between Evelyn and Joy’s miscommunicated relationship when Joy is portrayed as the horrifically garish multiverse villain of the film. Admittedly, the connection between Evelyn and her troubled husband, Waymond, is expressed in more touching detail as years of love, friendship, and loyalty keep the pair from coming to regular blows.
Though, the potential of the enlightening family drama is overshadowed by the extensive visuals expected of any fantasy film with a generous budget worth its salt and by moments of rather unnecessary comedy – most of which is toilet humour at best. For instance, those wishing to interact with the multiverse must do something statistically uncommon, leading to too many objects entering too many orifices. While the first (and even second and third) instance of this trope provides entertainment, we are left not just bored but irritated when it has been repeated to the nth degree.
Indeed, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a visuals and special effects marvel, transporting the viewer to bizarre worlds with the mere touch of a button, though once you’ve been thrilled by the film’s surface glitz, it doesn’t have a whole lot else to offer. Underpinning the whole narrative is the thematic throughline of responsibility and regret, with Evelyn looking back critically on her time as a mother and wife. Such moments are touching and wonderfully executed by the two eccentric filmmakers, but the duo lack the emotional conviction to truly pull such scenes off, quickly reverting back to comedy and lavish spectacle at the wrong time, leaving the dramatic heart of the story to languish.
It might purport to be all about life, hope and nihilism, but such themes are treated as an afterthought in a movie that much prefers to indulge in sci-fi storytelling and subtly rip off The Matrix at any possible chance. Still, this may be a little cynical, with Daniels having an evident appreciation for the history of cinema, injecting scenes with the same glow as Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love whilst also speaking to the sheer spectacle and thrill of cinema throughout.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is certainly worthy of praise, with independent and blockbuster cinema clashing together in an explosion of visual creativity, yet the praise that the film has received since its release arguably damages its reputation rather than bolstering it. With great performances from Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan, at its heart Daniels’ latest movie is a neat experimentation of a scrapbook of ideas, but worthy of unwavering praise, it is not.
