"Everything Everywhere All At Once": An insane movie about the multiverse, hope, and choices, anchored by a touching family drama

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 save the multiverse while contending with her choices and her splintered family.

The film is very funny, and the hilarity is heightened by the absurdity of the film's events, such as the central concept of having to perform a ridiculous or weird action you would not normally do in order to tap into the skills of your counterpart in another universe, such as a sign twirler, a chef, or a wrestler. There is a universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. Googly eyes are an important plot point and symbol. Yeah, it's a very irreverent film.

The film also dives into deep philosophical themes of nihilism, choices, and finding joy in the face of emptiness and hopelessness. The villain, Jobu Tupaki, is a complete nihilist, convinced that nothing matters after being exposed to all universes at once. On the flip side, you have Waymond, who is kind and compassionate in every universe, even in the one where he is single-mindedly dedicated to stopping Jobu Tupaki. Waymond is someone who is unfailingly optimistic, always looking on the bright side and finding things to be happy about. The film is ultimately about Evelyn being caught between these two extremes, and how her relationships with the other people in her life are falling apart because of her inability to take responsibility for her actions and choices.

However, despite the deep themes, the film is ultimately about overcoming the existential despair of the roads not taken and our seeming insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the world can be a big and scary place and maybe what we do won't amount to much in the end, but that just means that we get to create our own meaning for what life is all about, we get to embrace the love and joy we find precisely because of how fleeting it is, and above all else, we get to just laugh about the meaninglessness of it all with the people around us instead of succumbing to despair. We should be more accepting of others, and most importantly, we must be kind even in the darkest of times.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a film that is both broad in scope and thematic depth yet also tightly focused on dysfunctional family dynamics, a film that is blisteringly funny yet also somber and moving in its philosophical exploration of the meaning of life. It truly lives up to its title of being everything everywhere all at once, and provides an unforgettable experience.

Score: Googly Eyes/Hotdog Fingers