Something for Everyone in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” review

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), or EEAAO, is a multiverse-hopping, genre-bending movie about realizing one’s potential and choosing the life that is most authentic to oneself – especially in the midst of chaos.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Directed by: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Stephanie Hsu, Henry Shum Jr., Tallie Medal, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Runtime: 2 hours 19 minutes

**Includes Spoilers**

Absurdist Masterminds: Daniels

EEAAO (2022) is only the second full length feature film created by directors known as the “Daniels” – a writer/director team made up of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. They met while majoring in film at Emerson College located in Boston. For Kwan, Emerson College was just 40 minutes from where he had been born and raised by parents who are immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong. On the other hand, Scheinert was born and raised in Alabama before moving to Massachusetts. Since 2010, the duo’s initial rise to fame came from directing (as well as often appearing in) odd, yet eye-catching surrealist music videos for popular musicians – such as Kwan starring in the duo’s production for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s Turn Down for What. If you’ve never seen the music video for this earworm, the visuals will add a LOT of context for the type of humor the Daniels bring to their pieces.

The A24 Indie that Could: Award-Sweeping Film

Under distribution through indie house A24, EEAAO was originally only given a limited run but quickly increased to a nationwide release due to popular demand – even while the movie theater business struggled to bounce back from pandemic conditions. That popular demand has led the film to breaking tons of records since initially releasing in March 2022. Overall, the recognition garnered during awards seasons since its release set a high bar, with upward of 300 nominations! (See image above – which only has the wins *before* the Oscars).

EEAAO became the first film to sweep the Oscars in all the “above-the-line” categories for which it was nominated: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.

EVERYTHING

This film perfectly portrays a person struggling to fulfill the demands of their various life roles through Evelyn Wong (Michele Yeoh). Evelyn is constantly being pulled in different directions, struggling with not being able to meet all the demands. She is torn between her roles as: a homemaker, a business owner, a person with their own aspirations, and as an interdimensional heroine. In the opening scene, Evelyn attempts to prepare a meal for her family while the dinner table is scattered with paperwork related to taxes for her laundromat business. As a homemaker, she is expected to tend to the needs of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and father Gong Gong (James Hong) but her responsibilities as a business owner make it super difficult. Evelyn’s constant distraction and deprioritization of her family in favor of their business results in Waymond contemplating serving divorce paperwork to Evelyn as a wake up call to get her attention and show her how much he is hurting.

Everything comes to a head on the day the family has an important meeting with an IRS tax auditor. As if Evelyn doesn’t have enough on her plate, suddenly she is presented with a new role of multiversal master by an alternate universe version of Waymond! Her newfound role eventually comes into conflict with her role as a business owner and homemaker as she struggles to save her business at the IRS office while also fighting an interdimensional villain at the same time. The film’s ability to bend genre helps showcase Evelyn’s situation in a way that reflects the lives of women juggling their roles in daily life.

EVERYWHERE

While Evelyn is trying to sort out her taxes, counterparts from “the Alphaverse” start showing up in the bodies of her family and acquaintances. Alpha Waymond explains that their Evelyn was the one that discovered how to cross between parallel universes through “verse-jumping” into the bodies of counterparts by engaging in strange actions that the individual normally would never do. Unfortunately, Alpha Evelyn’s zeal for pushing her daughter Joy to her fullest potential accidentally broke Joy’s mind and created an irreverent entity going by Jobu Tupaki: Jobu in turn killed Alpha Evelyn.

Ever since, the Alphaverse has been looking everywhere for an Evelyn that can stop Jobu from obliterating everything. After first rejecting our Evelyn, Alpha Waymond goes on to have a realization that this Evelyn is the greatest failure out of every Evelyn in the multiverse … which means she actually has the most pathway connections to verse-jump into other versions of herself who succeeded in specific talents.

ALL AT ONCE

Eventually, Evelyn realizes that the only way to defeat Jobu is to become like her. Through excessive verse-jumping, Evelyn shatters her mind and is able to meet Jobu where she is at mentally. Jobu has created a black hole in the form of an everything bagel and wants to put herself out of her misery of knowing and seeing everything, everywhere, all at once – a perspective that seems to imply nothing matters.

At first, Evelyn also falls prey to nihilism, but then Waymond’s reminders to be kind breaks through the noise and allows Evelyn to engage in empathy. This empathy then allows Jobu to also turn away from nihilism and embrace community support.

Breaking Intergenerational Trauma and Finding Joy

The film shines in highlighting how different personalities can create a truly supportive community. While Evelyn is the main character, the film shows struggles of assimilating to a dominant culture paired with intergenerational trauma through the presence of her father Gong Gong and her daughter Joy. Evelyn fears that Gong Gong will see Joy’s identity as a lesbian who is dating a non-Asian woman (Becky played by Tallie Medel) as a personal failure of Evelyn’s parenting. The trauma of assimilation bleeding into intergenerational issues is evident between Evelyn and Joy each fearing disappointing the generation that raised them.

• Joy was born and raised in America, so is the most assimilated into American culture.
• Gong Gong is visiting but does not speak English and upholds a lot of traditional Chinese perspectives.
• Evelyn is in the middle, feeling pulled in multiple directions on what she should be embodying.

Evelyn takes refuge in various universes where Joy does not exist because Evelyn does not to marry Waymond in those threads. While at first she sees these as signs that her life would have been better if she has rejected Waymond, it turns out that what she really needed was time and space to find her true self. She realizes she loves Waymond and that he has always done what he can to support her and Joy. Once Evelyn embraces her own identity, she is able to give space and support for Joy/Jobu to make the choices that are best for her own self as well.

A Neurodivergent Path

While not explicitly stated in the film, the Daniels have explained in interviews that there is an underlying element of Evelyn having undiagnosed ADHD. While researching for the movie and looking into real-life examples of a person who is constantly being distracted and/or dissociating, they came across the explanation for undiagnosed ADHD in adults. This sparked a revelation that Kwan openly explains, “I started taking some ADHD tests. I started realizing . . . as tears were falling down my face . . . ‘Oh, no, maybe this is who I am. Maybe this is why I had such a hard time in school and still have such a hard time in my day-to-day life.’ Even without trying to put in ADHD, this movie was going to be infused with it from the very beginning. The DNA of it was all going to be there.”

I (a woman in her early 30’s) was actually just recently diagnosed with ADHD! So, I strongly resonate with Evelyn’s journey trying to manage distractions and waves of hyper-focus, while also feeling pressure from societal expectations of what a woman “should” be doing to support everyone around her. All of this is especially overwhelming when undiagnosed, because you have no idea why everybody else seems to know how to “keep it together” – seemingly through some key component that you’re not trying hard enough to utilize in your own life.

With this element especially in mind, I found that EEAAO does a great job of showing how everyone embracing their own personality – strengths and weaknesses – truly builds the strongest support network.

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