To celebrate the beginning of 2023, I wanted to be a little self-indulgent and review my favorite piece of media (mystery or otherwise) in existence. I will not be making a habit of these off-topic posts, so if you’ve followed my blog for mystery review and discussions and think I’m abandoning my core topic for a more eclectic spread of content, then don’t worry, I am not. This is a one-time occurrence to celebrate my blog’s third year in existence, so I hope you can forgive me these small and occasional indulgences.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a messy, chaotic, loud, and anarchical film which refuses to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a science-fiction action film? A madcap comedy? A tragedy about the interpersonal failings of a gay daughter and her intolerant mother? A drama pitting the philosophies of absurdism and nihilism against one another? All at once, it seems to want to be everything. It wants to be the kind of movie you turn your brain off to and munch on popcorn, and yet it also wants to be the film you spend hours of your life combing through its symbolism to analyze and pick apart every little nuance of framing and imagery. It wants to be an intimate story about interpersonal relationships, but it also wants to be a reality-spanning musing on the very nature of meaning and the futility of objectivity. It wants to be chaotic, and then it still wants to jam-pack every scene with dense foreshadowing and contextualization that shows an underlying sense of focus and directness rarely seen in this caliber in cinema.
It is everything, everywhere, all at once. That is not by accident.
Everything Everywhere All At Once stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, an exhausted Chinese-American immigrant who lives overtop of her laundromat business with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who is over-zealous and childishly optimistic, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who has grown distressed with her mother’s simultaneously overbearing but also emotionally-detached nature. It is Chinese New Years and Evelyn’s home and business is soon to be foreclosed, costing her everything, after multiple failed meetings with IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre due to the language barrier. The Wangs were supposed to bring their daughter, Joy, as a translator, but because Evelyn refuses to introduce Joy’s girlfriend Becky to her father, who flew in to celebrate the holiday, the two had a falling out and Joy is nowhere to be found.
It’s at this final and most critical of meetings that Waymond is taken over by another Waymond, and Evelyn is introduced to The Multiverse, a collection of every possible universe that could exist, and told that an interdimensional monster known as Jobu Tupaki seeks to take the entirety of the Multiverse over for the most bizarre of reasons: it wants to find Evelyn, alive. Evelyn is told that for one reason and only one reason she can be given the power to tap into the memories (and by extension the abilities) of any version of herself from any other reason. The reason? Evelyn is living her worst life, and by being the worst version of herself, she represents a maximum of untapped potential and unachieved dreams, and it’s that lack of accomplishment that gives her the ability to tap into every version of herself she could have been. With that potential, and with that power, Alpha Waymond (the Waymond from another universe) needs Evelyn to join him and his team of universe-hopping soldiers in the war against Jobu Tupaki.
At first, Evelyn wants nothing to do with inter-universal wars, Verse Jumping, or superpowers, and is more preoccupied with getting her life in this universe back together. However, when she discovers the truth behind Jobu Tupaki’s motivations and identity (that Jobu is her daughter, Joy), Evelyn becomes involved in an attempt to stop Jobu’s conquest and save their life before they can be senselessly killed…
From a synopsis of the first third of the film, bookmarked in-film as “PART 1: EVERYTHING“, you may be tempted to write off Everything Everywhere All At Once as a generic superhero film coasting off of the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Doctor Strange films. Superficially, the two resemble each other, involving a reluctant hero pushed into the role of a superhero who uses their powers to cross the boundaries between universes to save the very fabric of reality as we know it. However, there’s very important subtext at this point in the film that demarcates the film’s departure from its ostensibly bogstandard superhero premise: the metaphor of universes.
Structurally, Everything Everywhere All At Once tell its story split across every universe in existence, but there are a few alternate universes singled out as being cornerstones of the narrative and its themes. In one universe, Evelyn is a chef in an obvious parody of Disney/Pixar animated film Ratatouille in which she gets involved in the drama of her co-chef hiding a raccoon, named Raccacoonie, in his hat who pulls his hair to help in cook. In another universe, although she’s divorcing Waymond in her home universe, she experiences a romance with a movie star version of him in a universe clearly paying homage to In The Mood For Love. Earlier in that very same universe, Evelyn trains as a martial artist in a sepia-drenched sending-up of most typical kung-fu films. The common denominator in all of these universes is that every different universe represents a different style and genre of film, with everything from animated comedy to martial arts film to romantic drama being represented, and even Evelyn’s own universe acting as a stand-in for superhero movies.
The core of the movie’s identity is in the end of its first act, in which Evelyn’s mind is shattered across every universe. She experiences everything, everywhere, all at once. Not only is this, on a surface level, the moment the film pivots to its more bizarre, absurdist preoccupations, but it’s also subtextually the moment the film chooses to be everything, everywhere, all at once. To know that the universes represent style and genre, and to see that the inciting incident of the film is the boundaries between universes being broken, means one thing: Evelyn experiences everything, everywhere, all at once, and so do we, the audience, as the boundaries between genres (universes) being shattered gives the film free reign for absolute genre anarchy. It is every genre, all at once.
The shattering of the boundaries between universes represents the film’s rejection of the institution of rigid genre, and it’s with that rejection that the film begins to cultivate its identity as an absurdist film. From this point onwards, Evelyn is forced to cope with the simultaneous awareness of not millions, not billions, not trillions, but an infinite number of potentialities all running through her mind at all times. It’s this awareness that slowly leads her to the same conclusion that Joy had: nothing has meaning in and of itself. No moment has meaning, it’s merely a statistical inevitability. No person has meaning, they’re merely a cough of the universe. Every new discovery is a reminder that all things and all people are small and stupid.
The core conflict in the film, however, comes with Evelyn learning what to do with this information. Joy has learned nothing has meaning in and of itself, therefore trying to ascribe meaning to anything is a pointless endeavor. The only worthwhile pursuit is suicide. In this way, Joy represents the philosophy of nihilism. Evelyn, on the other hand, represents absurdism — yes, she agrees, nothing truly matters, but that is not a fact to be dreaded. It is to be celebrated, because the lack of inherent meaning gives you the unique opportunity to substitute in your own meaning, to find value in the moments and lives shared with the people around you.
However, the film is more than just musings on the nature of meaning. At the same time, it’s an intolerant mother learning to come to terms with her daughter being gay and having a relationship with a woman. It’s an overbearing mother learning to come to terms with her child’s independence. It’s a burnt-out, falling-out-of-love wife learning the true value of her relationships with other people and seeing her husband in a new light. It’s a depressed immigrant finding a new lease on life. It’s a superhero fighting to save the universe from assured destruction.
When is it all these things? All at once.
The cussedly impressive thing about Everything Everywhere All At Once is that it’s structurally four movies occurring at the same time and crossing over with each other constantly, and therefore every line of dialogue is ultimately contributing to the development of each of these films constantly. No part of the film just represents the obvious one thing it’s meant to; if you pick out a single scene in the movie, you can tie it into every other ongoing plotline in the film.
Consider, if you will, Joy’s statements that she feels like she’s fighting a never-ending battle all alone in a world where nobody cares. Can you pick out whether these statements are about the philosophy of nihilism? Or are they about the isolating experience of being discriminated against as a queer person in a heteronormative society? Or are they about living an abusive household with an emotionally detached and seemingly uncaring parent? Shockingly, at all times, the answer is “all three”.
When you start to peel away the layers of the film’s maximalist structure, you begin to realize that what once seemed like a mess, directionless chaos, is in actuality a dense and focused effort to build up its central themes, to not only state but demonstrate its core philosophy. Absurdism. If nothing matters, then the institutions of storytelling don’t matter, the boundaries between genres don’t matter, the boundaries between different films don’t matter. And so it rejects those ideas, and lovingly embraces what’s left behind. The film can be whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and it can be whatever it wants, all at once. Absurdism is not only a philosophy the film exposits, but a philosophy baked into the very skeleton of the movie, informing its style, tone, mood, and (lack of) genre.
So, I reiterate:
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a messy, chaotic, loud, and anarchical film which refuses to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a science-fiction action film? A madcap comedy? A tragedy about the interpersonal failings of a gay daughter and her intolerant mother? A drama pitting the philosophies of absurdism and nihilism against one another? All at once, it seems to want to be everything. It wants to be the kind of movie you turn your brain off to and munch on popcorn, and yet it also wants to be the film you spend hours of your life combing through its symbolism to analyze and pick apart every little nuance of framing and imagery. It wants to be an intimate story about interpersonal relationships, but it also wants to be a reality-spanning musing on the very nature of meaning and the futility of objectivity. It wants to be chaotic, and then it still wants to jam-pack every scene with dense foreshadowing and contextualization that shows an underlying sense of focus and directness rarely seen in this caliber in cinema.
It is everything, everywhere, all at once. That is not by accident.
The movie is insularly conflicting, a writhing mass of paradox and identity shifting, a hodgepodge of tone and style, a swirling typhoon of every genre of storytelling in existence… and at being that, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a glorious triumph. All of these traits, typically the calling card of a confused movie with no identity, no vision for what it wants to be, are in reality the very goal, the intention, and the thesis statement of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
It’s smart in a stupid way and stupid in a smart way, and smart in a smart way and stupid in a stupid way, it’s fun and boring, it’s quiet and loud, it’s science-fiction and fantasy, comedy and tragedy, mundane and universe-spanning, intimate and all-encompassing, chaotic and focused, messy and tidy, it is cerebral and emotional. It is a superhero film, but also a Christopher Nolan-esque high-concept science-fiction story, but also a motivational Wuxia martial arts film, but also a family drama, but also a romantic comedy, but also a philosophical drama, but also a mad-cap comedy, but also Looney Tunes, but also a drama about the life of an immigrant, but also a story about the queer experience… all at once.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a maximalist triumph that orients itself around the ambition of encompassing all things at all times. Rejecting the inherent meaning of institutions of storytelling, the film is able to bring all genres and all styles into and unto itself to tell one of the densest narratives of narrative history, combining its many disparate plot threats and sub-narratives incredibly. A beautifully absurdist masterpiece that is not only brainy in execution, but heartful in message, not only pulling out some of the smartest storytelling of all time but also delivering some of the most raw emotional gut punches in cinematic history. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a love letter to everything everywhere all at once, it is everything everywhere all at once, and it is truly exceptional at all things, a beautiful cacophony of contradiction and irreverence. Nothing short of stunning cinema, and a neat and tidy “mess” I’ll always love to love myself in.
Solving the Mystery of Murder 