The Daily Telegraph - Features
A movie that lives up to its title, and not in a good way
Film
Everything Everywhere All at Once 15 cert, 139 min
★★★ ★★
Dir Starring
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Jenny Slate
Tim Robey
Try this for a Multiverse of Madness. Pinning a genre on Everything Everywhere All at Once is tough enough even without a blindfold – Wikipedia calls it “an absurdist science-fiction comedy-drama action film”, and that’s just for starters. It is maybe not a musical or a western, but most other bases are pretty much covered.
The writer-directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, build their conceit out from a kitchensink drama, with a Chinese family in California, already stressed to the eyeballs, facing a gruelling tax audit for their launderette business. Out of nowhere, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is offered a cosmic escape route by her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who is able to guide her in and out of parallel universes with a bluetooth headset, and explains that out of all the world’s possible Evelyns, she got the roughest deal.
In other realities, she was a film star, a kung fu legend – Michelle Yeoh, essentially. Meanwhile, their disgruntled lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has gained trippy superpowers and is killing off every iteration of her mother she can find. A frumpy tax inspector called Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) is coming for Evelyn in one lifetime; in another, these two are a couple, and like the rest of the human race, they have hot dogs instead of fingers.
Everything Everywhere… has grand, all-things-to-all-people ambitions, but which parts land entertainingly and which get trying, over an excessive runtime, will be a different equation for everyone. I’ve rarely felt more impaled on the fence by a film, because, exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim.
In cinemas now