Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

(Amazon Streaming, November 2022) Bizarrely enough, I became convinced that Everything Everywhere All at Once was a serious pick for my favourite movie of 2022 during a silent set of shots featuring two rocks overlooking a lifeless landscape. But that feels appropriate enough for a film that defiantly refuses to do anything like anything else. Boldly reclaiming the multiverse concept from soulless attempts to smash different “Intellectual Properties” together, writers-directors the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, working on an entirely different level from their previous Swiss Army Man) combine the sublime with the ridiculous, the Science-Fictional with the domestic. The story revolves around an older woman (the divine Michelle Yeoh, getting an incredible third act in her acting career) who finds herself pulled into a complex story of diverging timelines in an attempt to keep her laundry business afloat. Mere words can’t quite describe the calculated insanity, branching timelines, multiple roles, comic inventiveness and, ultimately, heady concepts brought down to earth here. It takes a while to get into Everything Everywhere All at Once as the film begins in depressing mundanity and then gradually accumulates the concepts that it eventually deploys as a thematic symphony. What can initially feel like a throwaway joke or sight gag can pop up against as part of a sustained sequence spanning multiple universes, and it’s that joyous inventiveness that sets Everything Everywhere All at Once apart from so many other cookie-cutter films. It fully digests science-fictional concepts, movie grammar, other directors’ styles and spits out something wholly admirable. There’s a lot that goes essentially unremarked in a film with such wild inventions (such as a matter-of-fact treatment of ethnicity and sexual orientations) and that’s part of the viewing experience: a full all-engaging, all-encompassing movie confection that piles on small details and grand concepts. I didn’t just like it a lot—I loved it, and I will be a very disappointed cinephile here if it doesn’t get Oscar recognition. Normally, I wouldn’t bet on a science-fiction action comedy to get top nominations or wins, but seeing how the past decade of Academy Award winners has been filled with “movies that should not have won,” let’s just say that we’re no longer living in the same universe as we did a decade ago. [March 2023: I’m astonished to have been right on this one.]