Everything Everywhere All at Once asks us the most important question of all: What if all of existence depended on Michelle Yeoh figuring her life out? The movie follows Yeoh’s Evelyn, as she lives in her universe where she’s constantly defined by her failure. She is a disgrace to her father for leaving home, her husband wants a divorce, her daughter hates her, and she’s being audited because she can’t figure out what’s a business expensive versus a “hobby.”
But all that failure leads us into a journey of discovery for Evelyn that results in a beautifully poignant exploration of self, life, acceptance, and internal happiness that leaves you feeling loved and understood by the end of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s story. Written and directed by the duo, Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t just about one thing or even one woman. It’s universal—and, by extension, multiversal—and every audience member can find something to relate to throughout the film.
Understanding yourself
The Wang family owns a laundromat that seems relatively successful, but their tax situation is causing grief for the entire family. And it’s all that Evelyn can fixate on.
Evelyn is lost. She doesn’t care about her relationship with her husband or daughter, doesn’t care about herself, and only is focused on the situation at hand and nothing else. So, when she’s thrust into protecting the fabric of the universe from multiversal evil Jobu Tupaki, because the alpha universe version of her husband Waymond (Jonathan Ke Quan) jumps into her universe to tell her that’s what she must do, she’s suddenly confronted with her own issues that she’s consistently pushed away.
Every choice causes an alternate universe, and for Evelyn, she has more alternate lives based on how many times she’s “failed” in this specific timeline. She’s constantly told that’s why she can save the world, but it’s also tearing into her and the choices she’s made. But throughout Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn is constantly confronted with different versions of how her life could be, and she must reconcile the idea that her life could have been better if she’d made different choices with the reality that she still wouldn’t necessarily want to change all of those choices.
A mother-daughter struggle
At the core of everything is a mother and daughter trying to understand each other. Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu, just wants her mother to accept her as she is, with her girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel). But torn between being the woman everyone needs and actually recognizing what her family needs from her, Evelyn is too lost in her own disgrace to see what she’s doing to Joy, and it fuels her multiversal struggle—something that our main Evelyn keeps trying to explain away for her own Joy without realizing that the cause of all their problems was her inability to listen to her daughter and understand what Joy needs from her.
So, throughout the entire movie, we’re watching Evelyn not only gain an understanding of her own issues, but also how her decisions have affected Joy.
Love and loss
Outside of Evelyn’s relationship with her daughter is her love for Waymond. In the main universe the movie takes us through, he wants a divorce because he thinks maybe Evelyn’s clear regret for her choices is right and they shouldn’t be together. But in each world we see, their love is something important to their lives, and even when she doesn’t leave with him to go to America, they still come back to one another.
They’re not the “endgame” of every universe. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Deidre and Evelyn are together in the universe where we all have hot dogs for fingers, but still, Evelyn loves Waymond so deeply because whatever her mess of a life comes to, she needs his sweet and kind nature to balance her out. It’s what makes her realize how similar Joy is to her and why they both need Waymond and Becky (respectively).
They’re so stuck in their ideas of their own failures that Waymond and Becky are there to pull them back. And Waymond cares so deeply about Evelyn, constantly trying to help her and make her happy.
Lost in the multiverse
The reason Everything Everywhere All at Once works is because it isn’t completely stuck in being too out-there or different. It’s funny, emotional, and lets Michelle Yeoh shine in every version of Evelyn she brings to life, and it’s a wildly fun and poignant ride from start to finish. Everything Everywhere All at Once hits theaters on March 25 and is a perfect example as to why this is Michelle Yeoh’s world and we’re just simply living in it.
(image: A24)
