It Really Is - Everything Everywhere All At Once
What movies can be depends entirely on whose hands they are in. They can take modest swings with small ideas or they can bludgeon the form with mind-bending complexity in pursuit of something deeper. Most movies fall somewhere in between, but the Daniels’ movies never do. Here they are, once again, going toe-to-toe with the norms of storytelling in pursuit of an exploration of the universal. Everyone has paths they don’t take in life and the Daniels are here to ask you to consider those paths and how they relate to who you are today.
Our protagonist, Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh), is the Chinese-American owner of a laundromat who finds herself thrust into a metaphysical battle for the philosophical control of the meta-verse. Evelyn owns and operates the laundromat with her husband, Waymond (played by Ke Huy Quan), who recently decided he wants a divorce. The couple have a daughter, Joy (played by Stephanie Hsu), who Evelyn also has a poor relationship with due to Evelyn’s unwillingness to embrace that she is a lesbian and her general lack of care.
While going about her day-to-day business on a visit to the IRS, Evelyn is visited by someone from a parallel universe that explains that they need her help defeating Jobu Tapaki, a nihilistic force rooted in the idea that nothing matters. Evelyn is charged with hopping from universe to universe throughout the film to access various skills to defeat Jobu Tapaki and restore order in the multi-verse.
Content this immensely watchable, while at the same time being thought-provoking, is exceedingly rare. This is the kind of movie you can recommend to just about everyone—unless they just have poor taste. They somehow meld martial arts, sci-fi and the underpinnings of ancient philosophy into something easily digestible for a general audience. That is a feat and a half. And they do so with a visual flare that’s nothing short of distinctive.
In a role that could have gone any number of different directions, Michelle Yeoh does a spectacular job of making this feel like a lived in part. It never feels cheap or inauthentic; just frayed, like all of us. It is refreshing to see her get to tell this kind of story, which would be a remarkable role for anyone—let alone an Asian woman in her late 50s. The role, and her embodiment of it, are a revelation.
What the Daniels choose to do for their next project remains to be seen, but what is certain at this point is that their brand of original storytelling is one of a kind. The astounding complexity of the metaphysical ideas they translate into physical images is beyond rare. Like the title of the film, their filmmaking style manages to feel like everything, everywhere, all at once. Funny and serious, poignant and irreverent, joyous and melancholic. If the rest of Hollywood would take swings half as bold as these guys, we’d have a much more intriguing movie landscape.
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