So far, 2022 has delivered many great movies that could end up ranking among the year’s best. The Northman is an epic Viking revenge thriller with both John Wick-style action and poignant philosophical themes. X injects some much-needed terror back into the stale slasher genre while deconstructing its tropes and conventions. Most recently, Top Gun: Maverick has come along with dazzling aerial photography and a compelling story to boot. These are all strong movies, but there’s one 2022 release that’s so wildly imaginative and deeply moving that it blows them all out of the water – and it’s unlikely to be topped by anything else coming out this year.
The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is a true masterpiece. The scope is epic, but the story is intimate, using a bonkers interdimensional adventure to convey a life-affirming message about love and family. The plot jumps all over the place (and all over the spacetime continuum), but the directors never lose track of the themes and emotional throughlines. Since the whole thing plays like a cinematic magic trick, it’s difficult to describe – it has to be seen to be believed.
Not only is Everything Everywhere All at Once captivating from beginning to end; it’s also wholly original at a time when audiences are starved for originality. It’s been a while since a movie came along with this much imagination. Fresh ideas are few and far between in the modern cinematic landscape, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is jam-packed with them. With elements of science fiction, comedy, fantasy, martial arts actioners, and a couple of different styles of animation, this is one of the most ambitious genre cocktails ever attempted. The Daniels’ multiversal madness makes Quentin Tarantino’s genre-bending antics look tame by comparison. This is a movie whose emotional storytelling could go toe-to-toe with any Best Picture winner, but unlike any Best Picture winner (or any movie ever made), it also features a fanny pack beating, a parody of Ratatouille, and a universe where humans have evolved to have floppy hot dog fingers.
The Daniels commit to being as unpredictable and out there as possible from the opening frame to the end credits. Nothing is too crazy to be in this movie. Jamie Lee Curtis playing the piano with her toes is actually one of the less unusual things that happens. The filmmaking duo manages to walk a tricky tonal tightrope between two different movies: a tragic, intimate family drama about a cynical woman seeking to better herself after her usually optimistic husband serves her divorce papers, and a gonzo sci-fi kung fu movie about a superpowered martial artist fighting the possessed henchmen of a multiversal overlord created by one of her other selves.
Combining these two concepts into one movie shouldn’t work as well as it does, but the beauty of the Daniels’ direction is that they never let the genre elements overshadow the humanity of the story. Rather than stealing the spotlight from the characters’ relationships, the fight choreography, slapstick gags, and impending destruction of the multiverse are all used to reflect, visualize, and ultimately enhance the emotions. An all-conquering bagel at the center of the universe is introduced as a monochromatic MacGuffin, but it ends up symbolizing depression and self-destruction.
A huge part of what makes the movie work so well in spite of its many conflicting tones is the phenomenal work of the cast unifying the story with genuine humanity. Seamlessly switching between different variants of themselves, the actors do a terrific job of grounding the speculative sci-fi plot points in a tangible emotional reality. Michelle Yeoh gives possibly the greatest performance of her career as Evelyn, the painfully relatable protagonist who feels unfulfilled in her mundane life as a laundromat owner and longs for a more satisfying existence. With the role of Evelyn, Yeoh has finally been given the chance to show off her full acting range. Evelyn is a flawed dramatic character, a badass action hero, a nuanced romantic lead, and a comedic foil with both dry one-liners and physical gags, and Yeoh breathes authentic life into every dimension of the character.
Former Spielbergian child actor Ke Huy Quan makes an unforgettable comeback as Evelyn’s sweet, naive husband, Waymond. Quan similarly gets to explore the full range of his talent, nailing both comedic moments as silly as eating chapstick and dramatic moments as tearjerking as telling a movie star version of Evelyn that, in another life, he’d have been happy just doing laundry and taxes with her. Stephanie Hsu gives two fantastic performances in the movie with a dual role as Joy, Evelyn’s estranged daughter, and Jobu Tupaki, a villainous Joy variant intent on destroying the multiverse. As both a nihilistic Generation Z kid desperately trying to connect with her mother and the multiversal overlord who takes sadistic pleasure in torturing her, Hsu shares two completely different kinds of equally palpable on-screen chemistry with Yeoh.
The legendary James Hong brings both pathos and deadpan hilarity to the role of Evelyn’s overbearing father, Gong Gong. Curtis plays a few wildly different versions of her character Deirdre – one is a stuffy IRS auditor investigating Evelyn’s taxes, one is a brutal Jobu Tupaki enforcer, one is Evelyn’s hot-dog-fingered lover, etc. – and the iconic scream queen has a ton of fun chewing the scenery as every single one of them.
In today’s moviegoing landscape, audiences usually have to choose between big, fun, mindless blockbuster action movies and gripping, emotionally draining arthouse dramas. Everything Everywhere All at Once proves that it’s possible to have both in the same movie. Filmmakers don’t have to sacrifice all the things that make going to the movies fun to make a deep emotional connection with their audience. The Daniels’ verse-jumping gem is just as fun and hilarious and action-packed as any Marvel movie, and just as poignant and personal and heartbreaking as Moonlight.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is jam-packed with valuable life lessons. It teaches audiences that nobody is unlovable, that nihilism isn’t the way forward, that it isn’t always easy to “look on the bright side,” and that the meaning of life – in every conceivable universe – is in the eye of the beholder. It’s rare that a movie needs to be seen by everybody, but this one is full of so much existential wisdom that it should be required viewing for the human race.