Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film with attention-deficit maximalism in its bones — hot-dog fingers, googly eyes, a kung-fu fight powered by a butt plug — and the strange, almost embarrassing thing is how hard it earns its tears.
The Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) take the most exhausted premise in modern cinema, the multiverse, and do something nobody with a nine-figure budget has managed: they make it mean something. Their multiverse is not an IP delivery system; it is a panic attack rendered as genre, a portrait of a middle-aged immigrant woman, Evelyn, drowning in tax forms and disappointment and the unbridgeable distance to her queer daughter.
Michelle Yeoh, after decades of being criminally underused by the West, is finally handed the whole movie and carries it like she’s been waiting her entire life — action star, melodramatic lead, and slapstick clown, often in the same scene. Ke Huy Quan’s comeback as the sweet, fanny-packed husband is the film’s beating heart, and his “be a little kinder” monologue is the closest thing to a thesis the chaos allows. Stephanie Hsu and a never-better Jamie Lee Curtis round out a cast operating on pure conviction.
It is too much. That is by design, and occasionally the design backfires — the second act’s everything-bagel nihilism threatens to swallow the film’s own pacing, and a few of the gags land with a thud. By the time the rocks are talking, your tolerance for whimsy will have been load-tested.
But the Daniels are after something real underneath the noise: the radical, unfashionable argument that in a meaningless universe, kindness is the only rebellion that scales. Everything Everywhere is a feature-length argument against despair, dressed as the silliest movie ever made. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
A laundromat, a multiverse, and a mother who can’t talk to her daughter. The Daniels throw everything at the wall — and somewhere in the chaos, find the most generous film of its year.