A24 Season: Everything Everywhere All At Once (Dir Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2h 20m, 2022)

Everyone loves an underdog story. The plucky kid from the wrong side of the tracks making good, the small team, or individual defeating a seemingly all-conquering, all powerful opponent or team, the little guy coming out on top. Careers in cinema have been made, in front, and behind the camera, in bringing these punch-the-air stories to life, or in being real life underdogs slaving away on a masterpiece before bringing it to the screen in triumph. We've already spoken about cinematic underdogs

And, despite its hipster kudos, despite their Oscars, despite their roaring trade in $5-$15 million dollar movies, and despite being arguably the first thing that the average film-goer thinks of when the word "Indie" pops up, A24 is an underdog. Or rather...was. For, arguably, that great underdog winning out against the towering, immovable object has arrived. For the moment has arrived, for a studio content to produce films for their artistic quality rather than profit to have their first truly smash hit. This is it. Before 2022, A24's highest grossing films ran between $31-$81 million, a mere drop in the multiplex ocean. Everything has changed. This is uncharted territory for A24. And what a film to announce their arrival.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is, simply put, a masterpiece; a film that matches, on a budget of a stunningly low $25 million, every single punch of films dozens of times higher than its own, and, in stunning imagination, creates a moment, a feeling of its own world, its own logic that knocks the other staid multiverse-hopping tales of the multiplex into a cocked hat, that magnificently melds kung-fu, parallel universes, and a charming, and emotionally driven odyssey through motherhood, the Chinese-American experience, and life itself.

Everything.

We begin, though, with domesticity, and with one of the film's secret weapons, Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn Quan Wang, who runs a struggling laundromat with her charming, if somewhat meek husband, Waymond (a spectacular return for Ke Huy Quan), whilst awaiting the arrival of her elderly father, Gong Gong (the legendary James Hong), and attempting to make peace with her daughter, Joy, (Stephanie Hsu). With the company accounts due to the IRS, represented, in enjoyably chilly fashion by Jamie Lee Curtis's Deirdre, her father arriving from Hong Kong for a celebration, her increasingly henpecked husband, Waymond due to serve her divorce papers, and Joy trying to get her mother to accept Joy's girlfriend, Becky, so Evelyn is a woman seemingly stuck in a dead-end part of her life in which all of her decisions seem to have led her to .

It is, even before the film begins to explore its more outlandish side, a superbly illustrated domestic life of a American-Chinese family, their conversations leaping back and forth between English, their role in the community, and their invisibility to their customers perfectly outlined, whilst the relationship between generations of the family, between Gong Gong and Evelyn and between Evelyn and Joy, something that the film will come on to focus on in greater detail in its second and third sections, is already looming in the background, the relationship between mother and daughter fraught.

Their normality, however, is about to be utterly shattered-the film hints that all is not entirely normal with a brilliantly done "blink and you'll miss it" moment of Waymond suddenly changing from a meek man to a cartwheeling kung-fuing figure who leaps across the washing machines-but it is as the trio of Evelyn, Waymond and Gong Gong enter the lifts of the towering IRS offices that the film practically leaps, both feet first into the multiverse, with this universe's Waymond being taken over by Alpha Waymond (a wonderful about-face from Quan, in a no-nonsense action lead mould), who quickly briefs the bemused Evelyn, who assumes that her husband is once again playing the fool, that he has been looking for her, and quickly equips her with the technology that allows the hops between alternative parallel selves.

The device becomes active, and in just the first of a stunning barrage of jaw-dropping sequences, we're catapaulted through Evelyn's entire life, the choices she has made, and where these have propelled her, from her childhood, to her father's disdain for a girl, to her meeting and relationship with Waymond, to their move to the US, to Joy's birth and slow retreat from her mother, and arrival of her father., The lift opens, and now armed with the tool that will essentially power the film's magnificently madcap nature from this point onward, and with the instructions to think about entering the office's cupboard, so the film sets up its parallel universes. The meeting quickly deterioates-Deidre too forensic, too smart for the Wangs, who struggle, their language barrier and argument with Joy tripping them up, whilst Evelyn finds herself drifting into her other path, walking into the cupboard, and conversing with Alpha Waymond, which only further exacerbates their problems.

Alpha Waymond, for his part, outlines the history of the multiversal hopping tech, the importance of the now deceased Alpha Evelyn in creating it, and hints at the ominous figure of Jobu Tupaki. The cutting back and forth between these scenes only building to the confusion, to a point of inevitably catharsis, of release to this increasingly hostile feeling. The trio are given a final chance to produce the relevant paperwork, to prove themselves to Deirdre, and make to leave, only for a misunderstanding between Alpha Waymond and this world's Evelyn to, calamitously, lead to her punching Deirdre full in the face; cringing away, and with the building's security encroaching, so Alpha Waymond reappears on the scene.

If Everything Everywhere All At Once is a bagel (more on those later), kung-fu is its filling, great, wonderfully wholesome bites of the stuff; that the film has two of the best martial-artist actors, plus the supremely tough Jamie Lee Curtis, who's been doing her own stunts for years, is yet another of its secret weapons-but it is how the film depicts the multiverse through its central quartet's body language, through the way they portray, in some cases, dozens of alternate selves for Evelyn, Waymond and Joy, that the film makes you believe in its fight scenes. We see Ke Huy Quan straighten up, the meek facade of glasses tucked away into a shirt pocket, and we see the man transform into a brutally efficient martial artist that makes you wonder what the fuck were Hollywood ever thinking not giving this man all the roles he could ever want?

Holy fuck. Holy fuck is right, and we see Waymond deal with an entire squad of security officers, the scene becoming even more brutal when Waymond unclips his fanny pack and turns it into an instrument of chaos, whipping it this way and that as he levels his opponents, before filling it with aquarium pebbles to deliver brutally effective finishing blows. It is the film's ethos to fight scenes (and there are many) in a nutshell-offbeat, perfectly shot, with a bruising sensibility that belies the two decades that Quan has spent as a stunt director, and the off-the wall genius of Brian and Andy Le (who appear in several of these fight scenes), and at points gutbustingly funny or bizarre. Our heroes make their escape and it is here that we're introduced, in a tautly shot and masterfully expositional sequence, to the film's antagonist, Jobu Tupaki, (soon revealled to be the Joy of the Alpha universe) who proceeds to murder an alternative Evelyn in an astonishing series of match cuts, and then, in an equally astonishing series, hops universe to possess this universe's Joy, who sets off in the direction of the IRS building.

From here, the film follows Evelyn and Alpha/Waymond as the duo are chased by Deirdre, now, through one of the film's strangest conceits of carrying out bizarre quirks to gain another self's powers, armed with the skill-set of a wrestler. It is here, finally managing to connect to another self-in this case essentially a semi-fictionalised Yeoh who fell in with her world's Deirdre, learned martial arts from her, and became a famous actress, and the fight between Deirdre and Evelyn becomes a bruising clash of styles, culminating, in one of the film's most brutally funny moments, with the latter crashing head-first into a wall-that she becomes as much a partner as a foil to Evelyn in the myriad worlds the film explores becomes one of the film's most unexpectedly moving moments, and only further emphasises the conflict of her daughter's sexuality in Evelyn's arc in the film.

From here, the film practically goes into overdrive, matching magnificent martial arts sequences with the utterly bizarre; people are forced to stick trophies up their ass to gain martial arts powers, staple notes to their head, and soon our heroes are fighting vast numbers of seemingly ordinary people to get out of the building, Evelyn gaining confidence in her powers, and the film occasionally offering, at points bizarrely beautiful glimpses into alternative world. It's also where the film begins to build its pathos-the Evelyns our heroine connects to are successful-actors and kung-fu masters, with Waymond having become a successful businessman, or in a loving relationship with Deirdre, or a successful chef, and it becomes increasingly apparent, especially after she finds that Alpha Waymond's note has been written on his divorce papers for her, that her life here feels like a perfect storm of wrong decisions.

Yet, inevitably, the figure of Jobu stands in our hero's way-the corridor sequence in which she blinks out of existence, transfomers, shoots, or brutalises several police officers on her way to confront Evelyn, transforming in appearance, fighting style, and in simply pure out weirdness-is one of the greatest moments in the entire film, and that these match cuts, visual tricks, and stunningly odd moments are the work of just five visual effects artists feels more like witchcraft than simply proof that the spectacular can be done on a comparative shoestring. It's also proof, as the film upstages their confrontation with one of the funniest things I have ever seen, complete with Portsmouth Sinfonia-scored 2001 parody, that the film is at once conscious of how absolutely absurd, and how absolutely genius its premise is.

A confrontation with Gong Gong Alpha soon follows, in which he orders Evelyn to kill her own daughter, his and Jobu's forces clash. Despite the overwhelming power from Jobu, Evelyn vows to defeat her, and begins to use her powers to build herself up to being a true rival to the seemingly all-powerful menace, but, in the chaos, in his universe, Alpha Waymond is killed by Jobu, and, stuck without a guide, and with her mind overloaded by so many links, so Evelyn's mind, like the multiverse daughter that is now its biggest threat, splinters, and we are thrown into audio visual chaos, and-

Everywhere

Up to this point, Everything Everywhere All At Once has been an imaginative but, undeniably, action-centric movie-as the film leaps into its second third, so this goes merrily out of the window, as the film dives into exploration of other worlds and universes, and begins to blur exactly what is going on in each. The film thus cuts between, as Evelyn experiences her other possible selves, the increasingly fraught Wang household as she and Waymond return from the meeting, now panicked and about to lose their laundromat to Deirdre and the forces of the IRS, the actress-self, whose relationship with a wealthy and successful Waymond is slowly falling apart, (in shades of Wong Kar Wei's filmography), the Evelyn of a hot-dog fingered universe, whose relationship with Evelyn is on the rocks, and a truly bizarre universe in which Evelyn is a chef, and her colleague is puppeterred by a raccoon (voiced by, who else, Randy Newman).

In short, even Evelyn's other selves (save, perhaps, the raccoon/chef universe), echo our Evelyn in their increasingly meaningless, sorrowful lives. And it is here that the Everything Bagel, and the film's great message arrive. Jobu has hinted at the everything bagel before, and we've seen it, a Lynchian thing of nightmare that just so happens to be, well, a giant floating burnt bagel. It is, after all, what Jobu's henchmen pen onto their forehead, we see a brief glimpse of it once Joy has become Jobu, and it's been teased throughout as a bringer of calamity. Hell, it gets its own Ligetti meets Aphex Twin theme from Son Lux. It is Bad News. It has been created to destroy the multiverse. Except, what this force of utter destruction represents is not everything.

It's nothing

 It does this on a couple of levels. Most obviously, the Everything Bagel is a black hole. It's the antithesis of the vibrancy of the myriad worlds around it; we not only see this in the very costume design of the sinister adherents to the Everything Bagel, dressed all in quasi-religious black and white, not just in the austere surroundings in which it resides behind sacramental style curtain, but in the fact that we never get a black and white world throughout the rest of the film. Against such vividity, such life we have this darkness and austerity.

And yet, for such a grim concept, we have an elongated, and often hilarious-as their reality warping powers bounce against each other and they go from stick-figures to kung-fun heroes to prison warden and captive, to pinatas, a discussion of their condition, of the unique place they find themselves in-once again the film leaps through staggering jump cuts, as weapons transform, and our heroes move from scene to scene, leading to a remarkable sequence in which Jobu-as-Joy and her mother are walked in on by Waymond mid-fight-the film's master of its element, of the veritable building blocks of shot and cut and transition-put to use to pit the mother and daughter against each other.

It is here, in her inner sanctum that we finally get the film's crux, the driving force behind our villain, the reason she's after Evelyn. By this point, Evelyn has reached her end-point-her guide, Alpha-Waymond is dead, her relationships with two more Waymonds is deteriorating fast, her business in another world is falling apart, and due to be repossessed-we even see the impact that her fading hope has on yet other selves. But we also see that Evelyn is unwilling, unable to confront that her daughter needs her support-Jobu practically weaponises Evelyn's dismissal of her sexuality, of being unwilling to stand up to her father, And then the film drops its bombshell. The bagel is not a thing of outward destruction. Jobu doesn't want to destroy the multiverse. She wants to destroy herself. The true villain of this film isn't Jobu.

It's apathy. It's the endless universes in endless chaos everywhere, forever. Because everything is everywhere all at once for her, she wants to be nothing, pulling the perfectly average version of her mother who can understand her in as one last attempt to prove her point. For, at the centre of Everything Everywhere All At Once is a seismic conflict. Its hero will become apparent very soon, but first the film cuts Evelyn's ties with seemingly everyone, to prepare the stage for its villain. We see, in quiet, almost silent sequences, the shattering of the relationship between the actress Evelyn and the business Waymond fall apart in a Wong-tinted alley, their regrets laid bare. We see her dismiss one Evelyn via phone, and the other from her life. We see Evelyn give up, sign the divorce papers, and begin to destroy her own laundromat. We see her become a shadow of Jobu, take up a combat stance even as the utterly bathetic Waymond begs her not to, the intercutting becoming almost unbearable, as one by one she cuts away anything that matters. For, if the bagel represents anything, it is this.

NOTHING MATTERS

The film reaches its low point, its nadir, a visual scream of pain, and launches into a absolutely astonishing stream of images, that range from anime to alien to drag-queen to the film's editors in a Zoom meeting, to a tree, grapes, a dog, to a cat-headed business woman, to internet memes and YouTube thumbnails with Yeoh pasted in, to no fewer than three version of herself where she is crossdressing as a man, to ominous skull-headed figures, to a dinosaur, to myriad others. It's as jarring as it is a veritable cornucopia of slow-speed examination, and no doubt will be homaged for years, if not decades to come. It is, though, cinematically apocalyptic, and we see Evelyn, and the film, suddenly and gloriously change tack, Joy and Evelyn's conversation now taken up in subtitles as they become two stones. Our two leads are, quite literally, nothing-colourcoded subtitles on a screen, and the film, and Evelyn are about to follow down this nihilist path when

When we hear Waymond and Deirdre argue, and this pulls Evelyn back to the here and now, and somehow, the film begins to claw out of its pit, out of its nihilism. We see Waymond, for all his success in another world-and then the film pulls its masterstroke, matching the words of this Waymond with that of the one that now stands between Evelyn and her aggressors in the battered basement of the IRS building. And against this nihilism, against the nothingness, Waymond asks, simply, for us to be kind, and though Evelyn tries to dismiss it, though she tries to be the warrior the film's events have made her become, the film flashes back, not to the momentous moments of their life together, but to the small moments, where her husband's pure enthusiasm for life itself, googly eyes and all, shine through. The businessman turns, and admits that, in another life, the contentment of life with Evelyn, of the mundane world of laundry and taxes, would have been enough.


Even as Jobu tries to cajole her into her-increasingly teenage-nihilism, even summoning the Everything Bagel into the lobby of the IRS building, so we see Evelyn's resolve growing, and she realises, simply, that this battle cannot be fought with the power of other people, but with love. We see Evelyn go outside to simply speak to Deirdre, we see the two of them in the sausage finger universe reunite, and we see the nihilism of Jobu beaten back with love, its Matrix-esque bullet stop transformed into one of Waymond's adorably (and now, thanks to this film, memetically) goofy googly eyes, and charges, not into battle, but into love, solving, one by one, the wrongs of both these and their multiversal selves, her powers being used for good, for love (even if the definition of love stretches a little far in some cases), rescuing the fellow chef's raccoon in a moment that feels like every Pixar movie ever, before we cut back to the real world to see him launch into kung-fun chaos.

It is Evelyn's two most personal confrontations that the film leaves till last to tackle the generational divide, and in particular that between Evelyn and her father-we see Evelyn confront her father, that she was never proud of her, and vows not to repeat his faults, and accepts not just her daughter, but Becky, leaving the old man's robotic exoskeleton to fall away, as Evelyn chases Joy, and, even as her daughter tries to pull away, tries to escape into myriad other worlds, only to find her mother fighting back, determined not to lose her, and bellows, against all this nihil, against all this meaninglessness, against everything...that she is her mother. We see Gong Gong suddenly appear over his daughter's shoulder, to pull them both out of the tug of the bagel, and even as Joy tries to escape as a rock, as a human, even as she yells at Evelyn to "let me go", Evelyn refuses to let her go.

As chaos swirls around her, she declaims that, for all her faults, for all the endless size of the universe, that she will always want to be here with Joy-this version of Joy-and the few specks of time they may have together. It is an ending hat feels as momentous in the car-park outside a laundromat as it does as a rock rolling after another rock, as it does with a duo of chefs saving a talking raccoon from captivity, as it does with two couples trying to make their peace with each other it does as a multiverse changing moment. For a moment, the Daniel create one of the perfect finales of cinema and we end with Evelyn, at peace, among the distractions of the multiverse.

All At Once.

Somewhere around July 30th, or 31st this year, Everything Everywhere All At Once rolled over the $100 million mark. I was going to start this article with some long spiel about the comparison to the colossal budgeted and colossally successful other multiversal film out in 2022 (Hi, Doctor Strange), but this is rather ignoring what an absolute triumph Everything Everywhere All At Once is. It feels, as I've said elsewhere in this article, like a watershed moment for independent cinema. For all the fear that Daniels' had about this film running into multiversal competition, they've rocked up in Marvel's backyard and held their own, if not more so. It's the moment that many people seem to have sat up and noticed A24 as a major player outside the ever narrowing studio system

What a film to be that moment. I could be here for hours with plaudits, with love for this film, with love for its stars-to see the great Michelle Yeoh helm an action movie, to see, after nearly three decades behind the camera, Ke Huy Quan, an actor that had nearly given up on ever starring in a film again storm into view, to see the great James Hong utterly rule his appearances. It is a nigh miracle-and it seems almost disappointing to say this, that this is a film where the only major character not played by an Asian actor is Jamie Lee Curtis's Deirdre I could be here for hours lauding the fight scenes, the editing, the pure cinema of this film, the costumes, the music, the feel of this world.

But there can be no higher plaudit that this: in over five years of cinema, five years of these reviews, I have cried, perhaps once in a film before (that being the magnificent Belle). I had to rewatch the last half an hour of this wonderful film three times because I could not stop crying from pure, unabashed joy at this film. And this is a film of pure, at times almost wordlessly tangible joy, from its struggle between nihilism, between depression, and pure, familial love, to its behind-the-scenes triumphs, to just how beautiful a film the Daniels have made-you have to constantly remind yourself that this is their second film. You need this film in your life. This film will change your life. It is the film that, years from now, A24 will look back on as their moment of triumph, the moment they arrived in the mainstream. If it doesn't win something next March at the Oscars, the Academy can go hang.

More than anything, though, Everything Everywhere All At Once is is a joyous, beautiful, spectacular sprawling picture that takes in everything from universe ending battles between good & evil, to the love between a woman & her daughter. It is, simply, the best film of 2022. It is what all movies could be. This is what all movies should be.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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