Jumping through the multiverse in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
Newly released on digital platforms, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” features a dizzying array of different genres and elements – science fiction, comedy, family drama, absurdist humour, martial arts cinema, philosophical treatise and dystopian fantasy. Its title is self-reflexively accurate and intentional. It seeks to engage with “everything”. Truly. But our window into this world of everything, hinges on a woman and her family.
That woman is Evelyn. She is a harried wife and mother, running a notquite-successful laundromat with her husband (Waymond), grappling with her unwillingness to accept the new girlfriend of her daughter (Joy), and struggling to prove to her father (Gong Gong) – visiting from China – that she has made a good life for herself in America. A trip to the IRS, to meet with the laundromat’s designated auditor, thrusts Evelyn into a new world, or new versions of familiar worlds. A benign elevator trip with her husband suddenly turns surreal when the hitherto whimsical and calm Waymond transforms into a confident and assertive version of himself. But this is not Waymond, at least not the right one. This is a visitor from an Alpha Universe, where the society has recognised the existence of the multiverse and developed multiverse-jumping technology that allows individuals to harness the power, skills, memories and abilities of parallel versions of themselves.
This is the first, of many, scenes in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” where The Daniels (the collective moniker for writing and directing team Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) feel stalled by self-awareness. In this moment, like many, they give us explicit exposition. A character stops to give us a brief monologue to contextualise information, tell us what to feel and how to feel it and to offer the film’s own philosophical effect to us through dialogue. There is an important sharp turn later in the film, in the same building, where another version of Waymond offers another explanatory monologue as denouement, which feels similarly too aware of its metatextuality and self-reflexively conscious to truly cohere.
Alpha Waymond’s visit is not incidental. Somewhere, in some universe, the entire multiverse is being threatened by Jobu Tupaki (a parallel version of Joy). Tupaki is a sinister force who has been pushed to her limits by another version of Evelyn. Tupaki is now able to experience all universes simultaneously – feel everything, everywhere and all at once. And, with her godlike power, she seems intent on finding Evelyn to destroy her, and the entire multiverse. The Evelyn we know seems poised as the multiverse’s last hope; because she is the least developed version of Evelyn, bad at everything, her potential is boundless. And it is in realising the potential of all the other, better, versions
of herself that she may save the multiverse and herself.
It is important to recognise how a film is more than the exigencies of its plot, so that this straightforward description of the stakes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” are out of step with the actual experience of the film which consistently plays with form, genre mood and tone to create something that deliberately seeks to create an experience of sensory overload. Editor Paul Rogers and cinematographer Larkin Seiple are the film’s technical linchpins as we dizzyingly move through many different versions of Evelyn. Some of the differences are merely in personality. She is a singer in one, a chef in another, a martial arts performer in another (this one is the closest approximation of Michelle Yeoh, who plays Evelyn, whose experience as a martial arts performer the film makes good use of). But some of the differences are even more ambitious. In one universe, all beings are rocks. In another, all humans are pinatas. In another, humans have
sausages for fingers and have mastered a prodigious ability to use their toes.
At every turn, The Daniels thrust an array of concepts at the audience to place us within the headspace of Evelyn who feels as disoriented as she moves through time and space. It is an ambitious conceit that is valuable for its willingness to push cinema to the brink of its limits in some ways, but it’s also an ambition that emphasises how the centre of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” feels strangely myopic for me. This is an energetic visual experience that feels predicated on an emotional awareness that only superficially engages with the gamut of possibilities. It is aware of many different things, but feels unwilling to truly engage. The technology of the Alpha Universe allows for universe jumping by asking the user to do an improbable event where they then use a headset to escape to a different reality. In numerous moments, in a moment of acute danger, where the possibility of something painful looms, Evelyn hops to another universe. Avoiding the worst outcome. It is a quality the film takes to heart, as well.
In multiple moments of crisis, just when The Daniels are about to excavate a moment of great pain or trauma, and truly engage with the emotional messiness of Evelyn and her family, they interrupt the difficult onslaught of that pain. Either with a sense of humour that feels more amused with its outlandishness than its meaning, or with a confrontation of its own ridiculousness as a way to avoid truly wrestling with itself. In a moment, when met with a bizarre revelation, a character says: “That doesn’t make sense!” The sentiment is accurate. But The Daniels seem to fall into the trap of thinking that merely reacting to something is the same as engaging with it, or truly working to interpret it. And it is that sentiment which guides the emotions of the film which often feel superficial in their manifestations. By the end of the 139 minutes, I felt battered by the many different potentialities with so little willingness to really dig beneath the surface. So, the film recognises Evelyn’s homophobia. It recognises the intergenerational trauma of migrant lives. The existential queries of a live unlived. The casual racism of American life. But by its end, when it reaches what is meant to be an emotional crescendo, I kept waiting for the film to actually engage with its observances beyond a casual nod.
In the late-film moment where Waymond, the one we first meet, delivers what is meant to be the film’s defining philosophy I winced at the simplicity of it. Not because the ethos of something simple being meaningful is unbelievable, but because, like so much of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” it felt too easy. Even as the film’s visuals, sometimes jarring in their messiness but intentional in strategy, feel daring the film’s central emotional thrust feels less so. And it matters, because the film performs lip-service at being preoccupied with philosophical concerns but consistently only flirts with deep and powerful moments of tragedy, trauma and pain but resists engaging with them, instead opting to leap to the possibilities of other universes where better worlds exist. It wants the complexity that comes with pain and trauma but simultaneously wants an easy solution for that pain and trauma. I felt a moment of acute tension in a scene where a character lacerates their hands to temporarily win a battle, but the pain of that moment is soon forgotten and dismissed with a casual observation a few minutes later. The Daniels conceptualise the multiverse as a metaphor bleeding into a metaphor, everything as a referent for something else. If everything is a metaphor, then it begins to feel as if nothing is a metaphor and even as the flutter of possibility in each universe jump feels full of possibility “Everything Everywhere All at Once” feels spread too thin throughout reflexing on to every iteration of its own self-awareness that it feels like it lacks the
distance from itself to really consider how it works as a single unit. My intellectual appreciation for The Daniels’ intention wrestles with the emotional absence I feel at what they ultimately do with those intentions. So, the film never fully coheres as a complete works of art or expression. Any true engagement with philosophical complexity feels too inchoate to linger beyond the flurry of moments that temporarily excite.
Perhaps my emotional distance from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is summed up by the most genuine moment of sadness and pain that comes early on that digs at something the film’s conclusion seems to elide. Early in the narrative – before we learn of the multiverse – there is a moment where Evelyn has a chance to make right with her daughter, after an argument. It is taut with possibility, but she chooses unwisely. Regressing to a dismissive comment on her weight. The moment feels loaded with potential for excavation – really engaging with the intergenerational harm that comes from parent to child, that more than a single apology can fix. But to follow that particular thread, where it leads to by the end feels too easy. The Daniels cannot bear for any character to really appear as terrible, or awful, or mean or bad. But there is meanness in the world, and there is bad. And if we choose to jump to the kindness that is possible without really confronting that kindness is not always an outcome, then the illusion of goodness that remains feels incomplete. The emotional acuity of really confronting pain, without settling for resolutions that provide pockets of happiness, feels like a more emotionally robust possibility that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” comes almost close to connecting with, but never really daring to.
In some other universe, I feel moved by its answer to the pain of emotional toil in the same way many have been moved by its engagement with family conflict. But this is not that universe where I can relate to it. In this one, I admire the ambition, support the earnestness but can only shrug at the dynamics of the actual film of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. Confronted with its idea of everything, everywhere I only recognise my own ambivalence.