Review of Everything Everywhere All At Once

**May contain some spoilers.

“Every Rejection, every disappointment has led you here to this moment.”

— Alpha Waymond

When my husband suggested that we watch the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, I had some reservations, mainly my ADD. I’d already gleaned from watching the trailer that this movie likes to jump storylines a lot, which means I would have to pay close attention to every single minute detail similar to solving a riddle, and I’m not good at solving riddles or Rubik’s Cubes. In the end, I was swayed by Rotten Tomatoes’ “TOMATOMETER” that gave this film a 95% and an Audience Score of 89% — impressive stats.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a combination of films like The Matrix, Sliding Doors, Wizard of Oz and Being John Malkovich. Riddled with metaphor, symbolism and foreshadowing, it’s also a bit of a mind bender, and some suspension of reality is required. That being said, it’s a film that also has a lot of heart, mainly around the tense relationship between tiger-mom protagonist, Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, and her cynical, college drop-out daughter, Joy Wang, played by Stephanie Hsu. The film’s touchstone begins and ends in the Wang’s family laundromat, which has its bevy of notable customers.

Evelyn is getting ready to host a Chinese New Year party at their oatmeal-colored laundromat with festive foods and even a Karaoke machine for entertainment. In addition, she and her kind husband, Waymond Wang, played by Ke Huy Quan, are under a looming deadline with their IRS auditor, played by the brilliant Jamie Lee Curtis, who is unrecognizable in the role of Deirdre Beaubeirdre. The character of Deirdre bears a resemblance to Chef Bergen from the movie Trolls, especially when in a rage.

So with the party and tax deadline approaching, her husband’s body is taken over by Alpha-Waymond who looks like Evelyn’s husband but who is from the multiverse, coming through via advanced technology manned from a moving van in a multiverse called Alphaverse. He puts an ear headset on Evelyn, and tells her to breathe. In that moment, Evelyn Wang sees what her life would’ve looked like if she’d listened to her father and didn’t marry kind Waymond. She sees herself as a martial arts master and later a beautiful actress. Evelyn tells Waymond: “I saw my life without you. I wish you could have seen it…..it was beautiful.”

Over time, we see her in different universes as a Hibachi chef, an aerodynamic pizza sign holder, an opera singer, and an eluded lover of Deirdre Beaubeirdre, where they have hot dogs for fingers, and where they get very good with their feet to even side-by-side rocks with her daughter, Joy / Jobu Tupaki, in a multiverse that doesn’t support human life.

Midway through, I realized that this film isn’t so much about multiverses as it’s about a mother who had unknowingly pushed her daughter so far away that she was on the verge of losing her altogether. We can glean that Joy has been unfairly judged by her mother in the past for not being more ambitious when it comes to her life goals, and doesn’t fully accept her relationship with Becky as demonstrated when she introduces Joy’s girlfriend to her father. In the beginning, we see Evelyn tolerating Joy more than celebrating, accepting and loving her. She tells Joy she’s getting fat, and seems to always be running around aimlessly putting out fires; from cooking to doing taxes to managing the laundromat below their apartment to caring for her newly arrived father, who is now elderly and quite frail.

We see Joy’s pain manifest in a multiverse antagonist named Jobu Tupaki, a scary, angry, omnipresent force hell-bent on finding Evelyn to take her to the “Everything Bagel,” the round black hole she has created for multiverse destruction. It’s through Jobu Tupaki that Evelyn comes to really see her daughter, maybe for the first time, as beautiful and unique, deserving of all of her love. Evelyn realizes: “Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.”

As a mother of two beautiful, kind, and creative daughters who are vastly different from one another in every way, as they should be, this film really hits home for me. I saw a little of myself in Evelyn Wang, specifically in her pursuit of Joy.