Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a 2022 American science-fiction action film written and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as "Daniels"). It stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., with James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film premiered at South by Southwest on March 11, 2022. It began a limited theatrical release in the United States on March 25, 2022, before a wide release on April 8, by A24.

Part 1: Everything
Evelyn Wang is a first generation Chinese-American woman who runs a struggling laundromat with her husband, Waymond. Tensions are high due to the laundromat being audited by the IRS. Additionally, Waymond is trying to give Evelyn divorce papers, Evelyn's demanding father, Gong Gong, has just arrived from China, and Evelyn's daughter, Joy, has been trying to get her mother to accept her girlfriend, Becky. While at the IRS building for a meeting with IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra, Waymond's personality changes when his body is briefly taken over by Alpha Waymond, a version of Waymond from the Alpha Universe or "Alphaverse". Alpha Waymond explains to Evelyn that many parallel universes exist, since every choice made creates a new universe. The people of the Alphaverse, led by the late Alpha Evelyn, developed "verse-jumping" technology that allows people to access the skills, memories, and body of their parallel universe counterparts by fulfilling specific conditions. The multiverse is being threatened by Jobu Tupaki, formerly Alpha Joy. Her mind was splintered after Alpha Evelyn pushed her to extensively verse-jump; Jobu Tupaki now experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will. With her godlike power she has created a black hole-like "everything bagel" that can potentially destroy the multiverse.

Evelyn is given verse-jumping technology to fight Jobu Tupaki's verse-jumping minions, who begin converging on the IRS building. Evelyn learns of Waymond's plans to divorce her and discovers other lives where she made different choices and flourished, such as by becoming a kung fu master and movie star instead of leaving China with Waymond, who becomes a successful but lonely businessman. Alpha Waymond comes to believe that Evelyn, as the greatest failure of all Evelyns of the multiverse, has the untapped potential to defeat Jobu Tupaki. Alpha Gong Gong instructs Evelyn to kill Joy to hinder Jobu Tupaki, but Evelyn refuses. She decides she must face Jobu Tupaki by gaining the same powers as her, so she verse-jumps repeatedly while battling Jobu Tupaki's minions and Alpha Gong Gong's soldiers.

Part 2: Everywhere
Evelyn's mind splinters and she discovers other, bizarre universes such as one in which humans have hot dogs for fingers and she is in a romantic relationship with Deirdre, and another where she works alongside a teppanyaki chef who is secretly puppeteered by a raccoon. She learns that Jobu Tupaki created the everything bagel not to destroy everything, but to destroy herself, and has been searching for an Evelyn who can understand her. Jobu Tupaki feels that because there are so many vast universes and unending chaos, nothing truly matters.

In other universes, the Wangs are about to lose the laundromat due to tax errors, Alpha Waymond is killed by Jobu Tupaki, and businessman Waymond rejects movie star Evelyn after decades apart. Evelyn is nearly swayed to Jobu Tupaki's cause and stabs her universe's Waymond. She almost joins Jobu Tupaki in entering the bagel, but stops when she hears Waymond's calls to be kind and have hope. Evelyn defeats Jobu Tupaki's minions by using her multiverse knowledge to find what is hurting each of them and gives them happiness. Evelyn reaches Jobu Tupaki and tells her that she is not alone and that Evelyn will always choose to be with her, despite everywhere else she could be. Meanwhile, in parallel universes, Evelyn confronts Gong Gong and reconciles with Waymond and Joy, and Waymond convinces Deirdre to let the Wangs redo their taxes. Jobu Tupaki initially rejects Evelyn, but returns to her, and they embrace.

Part 3: All at Once
Shortly thereafter, the family's relationships have improved; Becky is now regarded as a part of the family, Waymond and Evelyn share a brief but romantic moment for the first time in a long while, and they return to the IRS building on a second chance to file their taxes. As Deirdre talks, Evelyn's attention is momentarily drawn to her alternate selves and the multiverse, before she grounds herself back in her home universe.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The movie truly lives up to its name by including some of the most outlandish concepts ever put on film. These include a talking raccoon, sentient rocks, hot dogs for fingers, a bagel that threatens the multiverse, awards shaped like butt plugs, etc. It shows no boundaries on how stupid everything may seem, but it makes all of this work somehow.
 * 2) The movie star universe Evelyn is shown to have no one close to her except her sensei. While she and Waymond are both extremely rich and successful, neither is remotely happy with their life, with Waymond in particular having basically given up on romance.
 * 3) Excellent acting from all the cast. In particular, Michelle Yeoh's performance as Evelyn Quan Wang received critical acclaim, with many reviewers calling it the best performance of her career.
 * 4) When Deirdre comes to repossess the laundromat, Waymond talks her out of it simply by sharing some information on their current situation, including that he and Evelyn are currently getting divorced. Deirdre not only gives them an extra week, she takes the time to commiserate with Evelyn over it.
 * 5) *Deirdre's comment about how "unlovable bitches like them make the world go round", Evelyn insists that she is not unlovable. And she would know, in multiple universes, she's married to Deirdre.
 * 6) A universe where everyone has hot dogs for fingers prompts one observer from the Alpha Universe tech van to question how that could possibly be a feasible path for human evolution...prompting a cut to hundreds of thousands of years ago, where a group of hot-dog-fingered proto-humans are beating a normal-fingered proto-human to death, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey, right down to a squawking, beatless rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra".
 * 7) Pays homage to pop-culture. In the case of this, Evelyn's explanation of the multiverse to her family involves her insistence that Ratatouille was actually a film about a cooking raccoon called Raccacoonie. Despite being tied up, Joy finds it Actually Pretty Funny while Waymond happily says, "I like that movie!"
 * 8) *It becomes even wilder when we see a universe where Evelyn is a chef...and her golden-boy coworker turns out to be hiding a raccoon under his hat. And then helping him save Raccacoonie from animal control becomes a key part of winning.
 * 9) Awesome soundtrack by Son Lux.
 * 10) Perfect pacing that's not too fast and not too slow. Even if the runtime was 139 minutes long, there is no getting boring, as it perfectly everything flows.
 * 11) All of its characters are relatable, and even likable too.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) Out of all the outlandish concepts this movie has, the dildo scene has been taken a bit too far.

Reception
Everything Everywhere All at Once was acclaimed by critics, who lauded its tone, imagination, direction, cast performances (particularly Yeoh and Quan), and handling of themes such as existentialism and nihilism. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 226 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's consensus reads, "Led by an outstanding Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its title with an expertly calibrated assault on the senses.". Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 82 out of 100 based on 43 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by PostTrak gave it an 89% positive score, with 77% saying they would definitely recommend it. Shortly after its release, the film became the highest-rated on Letterboxd, displacing Parasite (2019). As of May 22, 2022, however, the film now ranks at #3 on Letterboxd's top 250 Narrative Feature Films list, making Parasite the highest-rated film on the site once again, although Everything Everywhere All at Once currently remains the highest-rated American film on the site.

Trivia

 * In early drafts, the directors planned for the main character to have undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); through his research for the project, Kwan learned that he himself had undiagnosed ADHD.