🧂 Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

A woman discovers she can access the skills of every version of herself across the multiverse, and still can't get her taxes filed on time.

Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Distributed by A24. 2022.

🧂 Salt: 5 / 10. A film so in love with its own maximalism that it occasionally buries its best character under a pile of googly eyes. and ⭐ Stars: 8 / 10. One of the most purely inventive films of its year, and it never once forgets it's actually about a family.

Somewhere out there is a universe where doing your taxes doesn't require becoming a kung fu master. Evelyn Wang does not live in it.

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a laundromat, is being audited by the IRS, is losing her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) to a divorce he can't quite bring himself to file, and can't find a kind word for her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who just wants her mother to meet her girlfriend without wincing. The Daniels, of Swiss Army Man infamy, take that thoroughly unglamorous premise and detonate it across an infinite number of parallel universes, handing Evelyn the ability to "verse-jump" into the skills, memories, and bodies of every other Evelyn who made different choices, all in service of stopping a nihilistic, godlike entity who turns out to be a version of her own daughter. It sounds like nonsense on paper. On screen, it's one of the most emotionally coherent films of the decade, which is the trick that makes it work: the multiverse isn't the point, the kitchen-table argument underneath it is.

Michelle Yeoh plays every Evelyn like she's been waiting her whole career for this part, because she has. The film uses her actual filmography, movie-star Evelyn is a wink at In the Mood for Love-adjacent glamour Yeoh never quite got to have in Hollywood, as a gut-punch about the life she didn't choose, and Yeoh sells the exhaustion of a woman constantly reminded of every other version of herself who did better. It's a performance built on regret first and heroics second, which is exactly backwards from how these movies usually work, and it's why the film's climax lands as catharsis rather than spectacle.

Ke Huy Quan's Waymond is the smartest choice in the whole script. In lesser hands, the sweet, ineffectual husband is comic relief; here, his insistence on kindness, "please, be kind, especially when we don't know what's going on", is reframed as its own kind of verse-jumping superpower, a deliberate strategy against a universe that keeps handing Evelyn reasons to give up. Quan, in his first film role in decades, plays gentleness like it takes more nerve than violence, and the film agrees with him enough to let him win a fight with a fanny pack instead of a fist.

The hot dog-finger universe is the best sight gag doing the most quietly serious work. An entire timeline where humans evolved with sausages for hands sounds like pure Daniels shock comedy, and it is, but it's also where Evelyn finds an alternate Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis, having the time of her life as the IRS auditor turned piano-playing romantic partner) and the film uses the gag to sneak in one of its gentlest ideas: that love finds a way to be tender even when the bodies involved are absurd.

Jobu Tupaki's everything bagel is a nihilism metaphor that occasionally works harder than the story around it. Stephanie Hsu is genuinely devastating as a version of Joy who's seen every possible life and concluded none of them matter, and the image of a black hole disguised as a bagel with everything on it is the kind of high-concept swing few films would risk. But the back half's parade of universes, the rock-and-boulder scene, the raccoon-chef riff, is so committed to topping its own invention that Joy's actual despair sometimes gets lost in the spectacle built to justify it.

The verdict: a genre-blending, career-best showcase for Yeoh and a genuine comeback triumph for Quan, wrapped around a script that somehow uses time travel, kung fu, and a sentient bagel to say something true about generational trauma between an immigrant mother and her queer daughter. It occasionally mistakes more universes for more meaning, and its climactic reconciliation says its themes out loud right after two hours of showing them beautifully.

So why only five shakers? Because a film this confident in its imagery shouldn't need Evelyn to explain "be kind" to Joy in almost those exact words in the final scene, and a few of the gag universes exist more to be marketable stills than to serve Joy's arc. Real structural notes, not a knock on how much genuine craft and feeling got squeezed into two hours and twenty minutes.

So did doing the laundry and the taxes actually save the multiverse? No, kindness did. The laundry and the taxes still aren't done.

Pass the salt. 🧂