Veron The Reviewer

Everything Everywhere All At Once . A bold yet fitting title for this madcap movie directed by Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) that never really stops and takes the audience on a truly wild journey throughout the multiverse, mixed in with a dose of philosophical musings about emptiness and meaning and an emotional family drama at its core. The film starts with Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) having a bad day: her laundromat is being audited, her disapproving father (James Hong) is visiting, and her frigid relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) isn't getting any better. Things get weird when, on the way to the meeting with the inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) gives her a series of strange instructions. Following those instructions, Evelyn is recruited by an alternate version of Waymond to stop a dangerous threat to the multiverse. What follows is a journey that feels grand but also contained, and one that forces Evelyn to step up and...

You Won't Be Alone is not an easy film to watch.  The dialogue is sparse and entirely in an old Macedonian dialect. The protagonist never speaks. The pacing is slow, and yet there's something mesmerizing about the whole thing, in large part thanks to the beautiful scenery captured by the cinematographer. I could never look away, I was so completely immersed in the film. The plot is simple enough: A young witch rejects the witch who raised her, and, using the ability of witches to almost literally live someone else's life, she begins to understand more about humanity, even as the old witch expresses nothing but hatred towards humans.  The story is not the focus, merely the tool through which the themes of the film are laid out to be examined. Musings on identity, gender roles, privilege, and the innocence of youth are all at the heart what the film is trying to say, but the most important concepts are empathy and understanding. It is only with empathy that the young witch g...