EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

★★★ 1/2

R, 139 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is your standard multiverse martial arts movie about filing your taxes and midlife regret in which googly eyes, everything bagels and fanny packs play vital supporting roles and portals to parallel existences are opened not with a spell but with butt plugs and paper cuts. The movie is by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the filmmaking duo known as the “the Daniels,” whose first film, the buddy movie “Swiss Army Man,” co-starred Daniel Radcliffe as a very flatulent corpse. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” though, is more ambitious. It’s possible that the distance has never before been so great between a movie’s mundane storyline — in this case, a Chinese immigrant laundromat owner trying to file her taxes — and what extreme shape it takes. Rarely has a trip to the IRS yielded such cosmic, metaphysical digressions as it does in “Everything Everywhere at Once,” an antic, anarchic and yet affecting movie with the spin cycle set to supercollider. “The universe is so much bigger than you realize,” says Joy (Stephanie Hsu), daughter of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), at one point in the film. And though “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (a movie that very much lives up to its title) can verge on overload, it’s this liberating sense of limitless possibility that the movie leaves you filled with, both in its freewheeling anything-goes playfulness and in its surprisingly tender portrait of existential despair. Quite an accomplishment for a film that hinges on properly formatted tax receipts. Divorce papers are circulating. Yeoh, extraordinary here, plays Evelyn as frustrated and disoriented, bitter that her life has turned out to be a circle of laundry and taxes. Something has gone terribly wrong. When

she goes to visit the IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis), her humdrum reality starts to cleave in ways that will scrutinize the choices Evelyn has made leading to this scattered moment.