"Everything Everywhere All at Once" a joyously weird, one-of-a-kind blast of cinematic nirvana

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The filmmaking duo Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) are used to taking audacious swings, and they are only on their second feature film. It would seem impossible for these creatives to out-weird their fanciful and wonderfully absurd 2016 writing-directing debut “Swiss Army Man”—the one where Daniel Radcliffe played a farting corpse with a dancing erection—until “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was cooked up in their wild, innovative brains. In what has to already be the Daniels’ magnum opus, this is a go-for-broke, one-of-a-kind experience, a miracle of maximalist movie magic that will break your brain in the best way and soften your heart.

From the very start, the Daniels craft a thrilling, technically precise balancing act of making sure Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and her family endear themselves to the viewer immediately. Evelyn is harried, to say the least, as the owner of a laundromat about to be audited. She barely has time for her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Juan), who is so kind and patient that he can’t even spring divorce papers on her. She has her old-world, wheelchair-bound father (James Hong) to worry about, while her morose daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) just wants her family to accept her girlfriend as her girlfriend. Everything changes at the IRS office when sitting down in front of an auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) with a stack of receipts in tax liabilities. An alpha version of Waymond, who doesn’t seem to be the real Waymond, suddenly gives Evelyn strange instructions that send her into a multiverse. As the chosen one with the fate of the universe in her hands, this Evelyn must stop the nihilistic agent of chaos, Jobu Tupaki. That plot summary merely scratches the surface.

In its simplest terms, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is about the paths we take in our lives and the philosophies we hone that inform our future. The multiverse hook comes in to be the manifestation of Evelyn’s what-ifs and alternative lives. There’s an internal stream-of-consciousness logic to all of this, even if one character aptly says, “the less sense, the better,” when it comes to the plot mechanics. Hopping universes, the Daniels come up with such endlessly outrageous “jumping pads,” whether it’s eating a tube of chapstick or giving yourself paper cuts, that a lot of the fun comes from watching the film reinvent itself moment to moment.

The title is apropos, as “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a whole lot. Like 10 pounds of movie stuffed into a 5-pound skin, the film is bursting with everything-thrown-at-the-wall imagination, but everything sticks and the too-muchness is the feature, not a bug. Indescribably outlandish and gloriously messy yet immaculately made, the film is the Daniels’ rich, unfettered vision seen through to its fullest potential in the execution. Their script goes to wildly surprising places, managing to make a wonderful running joke about “Ratatouille” and one quietly hilarious verse involving subtitled inanimate objects. It’s all so trippy and soulful and transcendent, leaving one in awe and welcoming bewilderment.

In a role that wrings so much from the actress and martial-arts master, Michelle Yeoh is fantastic as Evelyn, who showcases that she can do anything. Across the entire ensemble, everyone is challenged, getting to come out and play in performances that could be considered quantifiable but are also finely tuned and layered with grace and subtleties. Most known for playing sidekick Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies” before taking a break from acting, Ke Huy Quan is lovely and heartbreaking as George Phan, and he happens to get one of the many exhilarating martial arts-style fights. A revelatory Stephanie Hsu gets to be different versions of Joy, whether it’s being vulnerable or snarky and maniacal as Jobu Tupaki, and she nails every one of them. Jamie Lee Curtis, game to look frumpy with a spare tire as award-winning auditor Deidre Beaubeirdra, gets several showy moments where, for a change, she gets to be the stalking monster, but she even gets a few sweet and moving moments with Yeoh. Finally, Jenny Slate has a small but memorable role as a vapid, Pekingese-toting laundromat customer.

Sidestepping mere gimmickry, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is breathlessly bonkers storytelling with an anything-goes sensibility that still feels fluid and disciplined somehow. Dizzying as it is dazzling, this is a nonstop blast of hotdog fingers, butt plug-shaped trophies, everything bagels, and kung-fu fighting with a fanny pack. Underneath its explosion of whiz-bang style and whiplash tones is a beautifully grounded and culturally specific yet universal story about the human experience. As the Daniels’ playfully nihilistic worldview goes, the world is big, we’re all small and stupid, and we should all be kinder to one another. There might have been a tighter or less indulgent cut somewhere, but then again it would not be the controlled chaos that is “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” As joyously weird and adventurous as cinema can get, no other film this year could possibly reach this one’s sublimely delirious heights.

Grade: A

A24 released “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (132 min.) in select theaters on March 25, 2022 with an expanded release on April 8, 2022.