The real multiverse of madness!
Evelyn Wang doesn’t have time to be the saviour of the multiverse – she barely has time to do her taxes. But Everything Everywhere All At Once understands something the MCU never quite grasped: the true chaos of infinite realities isn’t found in purple space tyrants or cameo bingo, but in the slow corrosion of unmet expectations, unrealised potential, and the weight of family ties stretched across generations like old elastic – brittle, snappable, and never quite elastic enough to go back to how things were.
Directed with almost manic precision by Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), the film weaponizes absurdity in a way that doesn’t dilute its emotional core. For every googly eye, hot dog finger, or raccoon chef, there’s a jagged shard of generational trauma or cultural alienation lurking just beneath the surface. Michelle Yeoh, gloriously unshackled from the poise and composure often demanded of her, delivers a performance that’s frayed at the edges in all the right ways. Her Evelyn isn’t an archetype – she’s a contradiction: an overwhelmed laundromat owner, an exasperated wife, a disappointed daughter and a disappointed mother, stitched together with guilt, obligation and the unspoken ache of compromise.
What makes Everything Everywhere All At Once so startlingly effective is that it doesn’t use the multiverse as a backdrop – it treats it as narrative texture. Each alternate Evelyn isn’t just a funhouse reflection; they’re ripples in the pond of what-ifs and should-haves, each one interrogating the consequences of assimilation, ambition, and maternal sacrifice. The film’s interdimensional gambits aren’t just conceptual gimmicks – they’re cultural ones too. Whether Evelyn is a movie star, a hibachi chef or a rock on a cliff’s edge, the narrative never loses sight of the fact that this isn’t about power – it’s about possibility. Most pop-culture multiverses dabble in parallel realities like a child with a sticker book; Everything Everywhere uses them to dismantle identity and rebuild it from the debris.
Ke Huy Quan’s Waymond is perhaps the film’s secret weapon – not because of the inherent nostalgia of his comeback (as those who sniffily dismiss his Oscar win for the role assert), but because the character is a quietly radical counterpoint to Evelyn’s entropy. He is kindness without passivity, a rejection of nihilism in soft-spoken tones and googly-eyed optimism. He might not leap between realities with martial prowess (although Quan gets his moment, and it’s glorious), but he anchors the film with an emotional logic stronger than any sci-fi rationale. In another filmmaker’s hands, his “be kind” monologue would have dissolved into mawkish treacle. Here, it lands like a sucker punch wrapped in silk.
Stephanie Hsu as Joy – and her multiversal, all-consuming alter ego Jobu Tupaki – is the kind of antagonist a lesser film might have attempted to scatter across an array of tie-in media and still left underwritten. Here, she’s firecracker chaos and aching vulnerability fused together. Her confrontation with Evelyn is less battle than negotiation – a desperate plea for mutual recognition. And in that, Everything Everywhere All At Once becomes not a story about saving the universe, but a story about choosing to stay in it, to endure it, when every other version of yourself might have opted out.
It helps that the film is unafraid to be stupid – joyfully, extravagantly stupid. But it’s smart about where it places its stupidity. The butt-plug fight, the bagel of nihilism, the Ratatouille riff – none of them feel thrown in to goose the pacing or curry meme favour. They serve character, tone, theme. If that sounds impossible, it probably should be. But Daniels are less interested in whether they should do something than whether they can, and unlike most multiverse fare, they’re smart enough to know when those two questions are different.
Amid the eye-popping edits, genre swerves, and philosophical sucker-punches, what emerges is a genuinely affecting depiction of an immigrant family caught between expectation and self-expression, tradition and reinvention. The film doesn’t offer healing as a deus ex machina – it offers it as a choice, repeatedly made, sometimes reluctantly, and always with the knowledge that no version of yourself will ever be perfect.
What Everything Everywhere All At Once achieves isn’t a cinematic revolution. It’s something trickier – a genre film that dares to take its own metaphysics seriously while never losing sight of the small, mundane tragedies that fuel them. It doesn’t discard the silliness or the spectacle. It enfolds them, reminds you that even when you’re staring into the bagel-shaped void, someone’s still got to do the laundry.
