Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

There’s an infinite number of reasons to love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which means I cannot count them all.

In the absence of such an option, I can start with Michelle Yeoh, the 59-year-old woman, also an international movie star, who serves as the action heroine at the center of this beautiful mess of a story. I can continue with the choice itself, of casting someone so unusual for a central role of this sort. Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang is the Chinese-American wife and mother, struggling to cope with being audited at the laundromat she owns and runs with her husband, barely managing to acknowledge the fact that her daughter is bringing her girlfriend to a planned party for Evelyn’s father.

And once the multiverse figures into the plot, each one of these four family members winds up playing a uniquely pivotal role, all of them delightful and surprising. And, sure, you could say co-directors and co-writers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are jumping on a “multiverse bandwagon” with this movie, but to their eternal credit, they manage to put an unparalleled spin on the concept. It’s repeatedly inventive, wildly imaginative, consistently clever, often hilarious, and most crucially, ultimately moving in a way that reveals the multiversal element supports a greater storytelling purpose rather than the other way around.

Kwan and Scheinert’s previous collaborative feature film project was Swiss Army Man (2016), starring Daniel Radcliffe as a corpse companion to a marooned Paul Dano. That movie was fine, its greatest asset being that it was not just unlike any other movie ever made, but in a bonkers way. Everything Everywhere All at Once is also both utterly unique and bonkers—there’s a particularly memorable scene in which office trophies are used as butt plugs as a means of accessing other universes—but is far more than just a fun gimmick. This movie has layers, broad metaphors, and subtly constructed themes. They all have to do with family relationships: father and daughter; wife and husband; most significantly, mother and daughter. There is a lot more to this movie than its uniquely clever construction.

It just happens also to be a wild ride, a skilled portrait of universal chaos, an action fantasy that is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. There was a film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 2005 that featured a hilarious sequence with the “infinite probability drive.” Everything Everywhere All at Once is like a full film adaptation of just that sequence, only with a stunningly coherent narrative thread. In the universe of this film, there are infinite universes, including one in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers. Kwan and Scheinert must really love that one, because they keep returning to it. Or, Evelyn does. At the behest of Kwan and Scheinert, really. You get it. There’s another one in which Evelyn and her daughter, Joy, are literally just rocks. This is the only universe, in fact, in which Joy is not played by Stephanie Hsu.

The inspired casting of supporting parts around Yeoh cannot go unmentioned. Also high on the list of reasons to love Everything Everywhere All at Once is Jamie Lee Curtis, a bona fide movie star in her own right, takiing on a role that would normally go to a usually-unrecognizable character actor. (To be fair, Margo Martindale would have been just as delightful in the part.) She plays Deirdre, the frumpy woman from the IRS performing the audit. But, as happens with all the other characters, she also gets overtaken by a more sinister version of herself from parallel universes. It’s complicated, you need to watch the movie. Suffice it to say, Curtis is wonderful.

Maybe the most fun surprise is Evelyn’s husband Waymond Wang, played by Ke Huy Quan. Now fifty years old, Quan stopped acting after 2002, only returned to it with a Netflix release in 2021, and Everything Everywhere All at Once is his first role in a theatrical release in twenty years. He had previously been a child actor, best known for his roles as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Data in The Goonies (1985). As an older man now, he has a peculiar mixture of both confident skill and vulnerable sensitivity that makes him perfect for the part, particularly for a docile and good-natured man sometimes overtaken by a combat-ready version of himself from alternate dimensions.

I have to admit, I had somewhat mixed feelings about the performance of Stephanie Hsu, as Evelyn’s daughter Joy, who winds up being important to the story in a way I can’t spoil here. She also gets a wide range of versions of Joy to portray, some of them vulnerable and sad, some of them over the top to the point of campy. When I realized she also plays Mei, Joel’s Chinese girlfriend on the Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it hit me how impressive her range actually is.

All that said, it still all comes back to Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, the most emotionally defeated of all multiversal versions of herself. This turns out to be key to her role in bringing “balance” back to the infinite cross section of dimensions. Kwan and Scheinert take this exceptionally well edited representation of all possible versions of all things, and brings it back to pretty simple notions of familial love and how it can bring meaning to an otherwise meaningless and inconsequential existence. It’s ultimately pretty typical in terms of Hollywood movie concepts, but that seems to be part of the point. And if nothing else, it’s fantastic to see such things couched in the context of a relationship between an older woman and her daughter. The successful integration of thematic substance into a movie that is so inventive and so much fun can’t really be overstated. Everything Everywhere All at Once is ironically a singular experience, or at least it is in this universe.

*There’s so much more going on than you even know.*

Overall: A-