“Our tiny movie out MARVELS everything out there,” Everything Everywhere All At Once star Jamie Lee Curtis wrote on Instagram recently. “AND it COST LESS than the ENTIRE craft service budget on ‘Doctor Strange’ and/or any other Marvel movie.” As IndieWire points out, she was referring to a New York Times review comparing the two films, and it’s easy to see why: both were released within roughly the same window and rely on the idea of people being able to access multiversal versions of themselves to tell a story about motherhood. 

Though the similarities and timings are striking, it always seems a little pointless pitting hulking great franchise beasts that have to appeal to the broadest possible audience while also furthering a larger narrative against (likely) standalone indie movies that face no such constraints. However, if I were to place a bet on the particular David vs. the Goliath fight, my money would undoubtedly be on the little guy.

Finally out in the UK after a limited but highly lucrative US theatrical release, Everything Everywhere All At Once, at its simplest, is a day in the life of struggling laundromat owners and Chinese-American immigrants, Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and Wayland Wang (Ke Huy Quan – back from a 20-year hiatus). They’re due to file their taxes at the IRS with Curtis’ stern-faced agent, Dierdre Beaubierdra, which are a mess, on the same day they’re to hold a Chinese New Year party for Evelyn’s disapproving father Gong Gong (the legendary James Hong). While all this is going on, their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), with whom Evelyn’s relationship has become strained, vies for her mother’s attention so she can properly ingratiate her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel) into the family. 

The franticness of the day coincides with Waymond’s body being suddenly inhabited by his Alpha universe counterpart, who tells Evelyn she’s to become part of a multiversal war against a powerful, destructive entity, Jobu Tupaki, who’ll stop at nothing to find her. What follows is a mad scramble to not only hold every reality together at once but also the fracturing Wang family, whose intergenerational struggle has become writ large on this multiversal chaos. 

It’s this solid emotional grounding that stops Everything Everywhere All At Once from totally unravelling, though, at the same time, the constant threat of this keeps the two-and-a-half-hour epic from ever becoming stagnant or unwieldy. In fact, the pacing is pitch-perfect, largely thanks to superb direction from the Daniels duo (Swiss Army Man) and editing from Paul Rogers, ranging from rapid and frenetic cuts at almost lightspeed between different worlds at a time before grinding to a near-halt for dynamic slow-mo. The martial arts scenes, meanwhile, are fluidly handled to showcase Yeoh and Quan at their most masterfully graceful, while the comedy beats – several of which are laugh-out-loud – are fantastically timed: you’ll never look at a fanny pack as a harmless ‘dadcore’ accessory again. Much of this feels like it owes a debt to surreal action-comedy auteur, Stephen Chow.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Everything Everywhere All At Once, though, other than, well, absolutely everything (and indeed all at once), is its incredible sympathy towards every member of its cast, from its endearingly optimistic dad to its nihilistic, pop star-styled villain. The journey of Yeoh’s character, a part originally written with Jackie Chan in mind, is so emotionally bundled up in the narrative that you genuinely feel your own confusion and eventual clarity at what’s going on line up precisely with hers.

Much like the unfairly hampered Turning Red, the film has strong specificity in the Asian-American experience, this time, from the mother’s point of view rather than the daughter’s. But while this specificity imbues it with personality and personalness, the universality of its themes makes it spiral and bloom into the stratosphere: that our connections and choices form and dissolve entire worlds of their own, and that our current time is over-stimulating enough to fry our brains to mush if we’re not careful.

Sumptuously designed, sensitively acted and bursting with pure imagination, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a sheer pleasure to behold and a tour de force to experience; everything cinema is made for.

words HANNAH COLLINS  

Out in cinemas now