Written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Schienert
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Key Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong & Jamie Lee Curtis
Runtime: 2 hours and 12 minutes
In theaters April 8th

by A. Freedman, Staff Writer

Sandwiched in between Spiderman: No Way Home and the next Doctor Strange movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once is yet another story of a collapsing multiverse. Though if you know the Daniels, the directing pair whose debut Swiss Army Man had a guy flying on a farting corpse across the ocean, you know it won't be anything like those other movies.

The goddess Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant woman who owns a California laundromat with her husband. Taking care of her ailing father (a 92 year old James Hong) and struggling to fully accept her queer daughter (Stephanie Hsu) would be enough to deal with, but the IRS breathing down her neck takes the cake. One day, amidst a pile of receipts with the exasperating tax auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis! this cast...), a little shard of her universe breaks off, and Evelyn is flung headfirst into a new dilemma. Now she has to save the world. A woman's work is never done!

Aided by her husband (former child star Ke Huy Quan, best known as "Short Round" in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and "Data" in The Goonies), Evelyn is introduced to the concept of the multiverse. Only, this multiverse is made up of all the infinite amount of other lives she could have led. Every decision she has ever made in her life created countless other roads not taken- and those worlds all concurrently still exist...and why wouldn't they? Social media has opened up a flood of comparison oriented thinking- we spend so much time now gazing into the lives of others and wondering what it would be like to be them. What if we had made different choices? Would we have turned out differently? Happier? Better? So while the concept of this multiverse may be a fiction, it might feel quite real to anyone who spends a good chunk of their day scrolling through apps.

All is not right in the multi-verse, as it turns out an antagonist named Jobu Tapaki is threatening to bring the whole thing down. Then comes an exciting explosion of martial arts, talking raccoons, sex toys utilized as weapons, bagels, and heads that explode into confetti. Strengths in one universe are weaknesses in another, and vice versa. To be honest, the plot? It doesn't really matter. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie that you feel your way through as you ride the wave of its internal logic. If you get what Evelyn's relationships are like and what they mean to her, and you connect with the crushing weight of expectations and disappointment that have befallen her, then you are just along for the ride like she is. Much like The Matrix, there is a whole lot of action on top, while the core of the movie is a strong philosophical, emotional pulse beating under the surface (Lily Wachowski herself recently praised the film on Twitter). All the while, the action is littered with bits, bathroom humor and the kind of juvenilia you haven't engaged with since middle school. One can imagine the Daniels in the writers room wading through years of long simmering bits and inside jokes, and reverse engineering things to find a way to fit them in.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a major step up from the enjoyable Swiss Army Man in terms of scope and filmmaking ability. Much like the Wachowskis, it is clear the Daniels have a humanistic ethos and a worldview they infuse into everything they do. That ethos goes something like this: Be weird. Be gross. Be silly. Be earnest...but most of all, be kind.