Movie Review: 'Everything, Everywhere, All at Once' is My Favorite Movie

Everything Everywhere All at Once is my new favorite movie. This gloriously chaotic comedy drama from directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, is an epic of galaxy-brained thought experiments, love, despair, and everything in between. While the Multiverse is a concept most often given over to Marvel movies in our modern pop culture, it’s also a real theoretical and philosophical concept and Everything Everywhere All at Once plays out the theoretical and philosophical concept to an absurdly brilliant degree to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter and the choices that made them who they are.

The completely brilliant Michelle Yeoh stars in Everything Everywhere All at Once as Evelyn, a troubled, easily distracted, and deeply unfulfilled Laundromat owner. Evelyn is scatterbrained, everything requires her attention all the time. Her family business is being audited by a cranky IRS Agent, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), she’s growing disconnected from her dippy husband, Waymund (Ke Huy Quan), and her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is strained to the breaking point as Evelyn struggles with not wanting to tell her father, Gong Gong (James Hong), that Joy is gay out of fear of his reaction.

Evelyn is incapable of fully engaging with anything happening, seeming to have constantly divided her attention to a million different tasks, hobbies, and diversions. Then Evelyn is thrust into the immediate moment when her usually mild mannered husband suddenly morphs into a man of action. He tells Evelyn that he’s not her husband but rather a version of Waymund from a so-called Alpha Universe where another version of her created technology that allowed them to travel through the multiverse using the minds and bodies of other versions of themselves.

The multiverse is in crisis as an evil entity has been going from Multiverse to Multiverse killing versions of Evelyn, searching for this universe’s Evelyn, who may be the only version of herself who can travel to all parts of the multiverse. Alpha Waymund tells Evelyn that she can access other versions of herself, using their skills in a million different walks of life to fight back against the evil entity known as the Jobu Topacky. Evelyn is, not surprisingly, skeptical, but when she follows the instructions, does something weird, and begins accessing the multiverse, she quickly starts to get a handle on things.

From this description, you might think you have an idea where this might be going but trust me when I tell you, you have no idea where this movie is headed. It involves love, kindness, swordplay, martial arts, philosophical rocks, a bagel with literally everything on it, and so much more, all of it cohering around the relationship between Evelyn and Joy, the relationship between love and despair, between hope and pessimism, meaning and nothingness. It’s a story that explores the roots of hopelessness and the role compassion can play in making the chaos of life bearable.

It’s a lot, it’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a duo who went to Film School together and broke through creating incredible music videos. In 2019, Scheinert moved into feature directing with the incredible debut The Death of Dick Long, a crime movie with a gob smacked premise and payoff. Together, as Daniels, they’ve taken the artistry of their music videos and the bold energy of Dick Long, and combined those blazingly brilliant sensibilities to create Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Everything Everywhere All at Once reached me in a profoundly emotional way. I was so moved that I can’t, honestly, provide an objective opinion of the movie. I fell in love with this movie, I felt like the movie spoke to things as I see them and there really is no way for me to objectively explain why I see the world the way I do or why that makes Everything Everywhere All at Once a great movie. I can only speak from my heart when I tell you that the themes of compassion, understanding, sadness, despair and the overwhelming power of saying ‘I love you’ and meaning it, mean more to me than I can express.

The best endorsement I can give you is to say, I walked into Everything Everywhere All at Once to see a movie and came out having seen my favorite movie of all time. Your experiences will absolutely vary from mine but if you’re at all like me, you may share the joy I feel having experienced this one of a kind movie. Everything Everywhere All at Once opened in theaters nationwide on April 8th, 2022.