The Guardian (USA)

Everything Everywhere All at Once review – nothing nowhere over a long period of time

- Peter Bradshaw

This hipster hypefest is an adventure in alternativ­e existences and multiverse realities from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – the “Daniels” – who in 2016 gave us the Jonzeian comedy Swiss Army Man. Everything Everywhere All at Once has been critically swooned over in the US and pretty much everywhere else, so it’s disconcert­ing to find it franticall­y hyperactiv­e and self-admiring and yet strangely laborious, dull and overdeterm­ined, never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a Chinese-American woman who co-owns a scuzzy laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan); Evelyn is discontent­ed with her life and has a tense relationsh­ip with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), using Joy’s frail and old-fashioned grandfathe­r Gong Gong (James Hong) – who lives with them – as an excuse not to accept Joy’s gay identity. Evelyn reaches a crisis when confronted by an angry tax officer, Deirdre Beaubeirdr­a (Jamie Lee

Curtis), who is auditing their business, and furious about Evelyn’s attempts to claim deductions for a karaoke machine for the laundromat’s community party nights, at which Evelyn also offers food. In her heart, poor Evelyn figures she could have been a singer, or a chef, or a movie star in another life and this tax-deduction issue triggers a crazy journey into any number of different universes for more than two hours.

There are some nice gags and sprightly Kubrickian touches, and one genuinely shocking scene when Evelyn fat-shames her daughter – an authentica­lly upsetting moment of family dysfunctio­n that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe. But this mad succession of consequenc­e-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time. Again, this film is much admired and arrives adorned with saucer-eyed critical notices … I wish I liked it more.

• Everything Everywhere All at Once is released in cinemas on 13 May.

 ?? ?? Crazy journey … Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Photograph: A24/Allstar
Crazy journey … Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Photograph: A24/Allstar

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