"Everything Everywhere All At Once" written by Gregory Mann

(Showtimes London Wed 4 May Thu 5 May Fri 6 May Sat 7 May Sun 8 May

Mon 9 May Tue 10 May, Leicester Square, 400 m·Leicester Square, LONDON WC2H 7NA, United Kingdom, IMAX 19:00)

"Everything Everywhere All At Once"

It's not exactly wrong, it's, after all, where "Everything" begins. When the film opens, we meet Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) as a harried laundromat owner, living above her business in a cramped apartment and facing a mountain of paperwork amid an audit from the IRS. She's stressed about her aging father (James Hong) coming to stay and struggles to listen to both her grown daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her tender-hearted husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). The character of Waymond is a distinct part that ping-pongs between a soft-hearted husband and, in his multiverse persona, heroic action star. Evelyn is really strong, determined, and the sort of mother who's keeping the ship afloat. For Evelyn, she has to confront a multiverse on the brink of collapse, an extreme manifestation of the sensory overload that the modern world is increasingly defined by, to see the family that has always been there. You've to go to the end of the world to find out what really matters to you, your daughter, your husband, would you make another choice? But while meeting with an IRS agent Deirdre Bezaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), a strange occurrence involving her own husband pulls her into a multidimensional adventure that puts the fate of every universe in her hands, and also forces her to confront who she's to herself and her family.

The film rushes headlong into unruly anarchy; Evelyn is plunged into the meta-physical world of 'verse-jumping', veering from the mundane dreariness of an IRS building to the palatial lair of a nihilistic villain named Jobu Tupaki, from the flashing lights of Hong Kong red carpets to a deserted canyon where sentient rocks manage to have a heart-to-heart. But this sense of an unhinged imagination, of endless mayhem, ultimately serves to transform the universal, or the multi-universal, into something intimate, an earnest meditation on truly seeing those near us in a time when it feels as if the center will not hold. The high-wire achievement of "Everything" is precisely in embodying this unwieldy tone. The almost schizophrenic imagination that Evelyn falls into causes the film to builds towards a conclusion that's surprisingly cathartic; Evelyn's journey through all of her possible lives helps her understand what matters most in her own. The pair initially conceptualized Evelyn as a woman with undiagnosed ADHD, a condition that in a way makes her uniquely equipped to tap into other universes. In the film, Evelyn becomes a Neo-like chosen one specifically because she's the single-most failed version of all her potential selves.

It's also possible to see Evelyn's many lives as an allegory for the immigrant mother, appealing paths suddenly walled off, like alternate selves, when you leave your home, the new roads you’ve been promised in a land ostensibly rife with op- portunity reveal themselves to be largely inaccessible. For her, the journey has not been easy. She made a choice to leave her own family in China and set up a new life with a man that she loves, and wants to have a fresh start, but things do not always go according to plan. That experience makes the feelings of the next generation, who grow up and live a life of relative stability in a country they feel is innately their home, practically illegible to a mother like her. In this sense, it's perfectly apt that Evelyn's daughter, Joy, is also the multiverse's villain, Jobu Tupaki, an agent of chaos that's both the thing to defeat and perhaps to save. Jobu is a manifestation of that kind of weird generation gap, and the multiverse can play as a really funny metaphor for just the Internet. "Everything" is most obviously attempt at trying to encapsulate the first part, but you can sense the latter lurking in background as well. Of course, if climate dread is an inspiration, it takes on a decidedly different look, in Jobu's evil plan, an everything bagel-void threatens to swallow the multiverse and destroy us all.

The film is inspired by 'History of Rise and Fall' by the artist Ikeda Manab, an elaborate pen-and-ink drawing featuring a maelstrom of pagodas, gnarled cherry branches, and railroad tracks, a fittingly abundant example of Manabu's glorious, almost painfully maximalist style. He does these things that hurt your brain when you look at them because they're so intricate, so detailed, so dense. But when you pull back, you're like, oh, that's a tree. It's a headache-inducing diagram on a wall-sized chalkboard contains over a dozen color-coded storylines, scribbles of per-colating ideas, and what may or may not be a phallic doodle. It's an entirely predictable issue, one written into the title of the movie, as it's cacophony of elements clarifies into something startlingly simple, rather transcendent. Watching the film, it retains that sense of maximalist, gonzo energy.

The biggest seed that drove us through, that feels like a metaphor for what we're going through right now in society, is just this information overload, this stretching. People keep saying ‘empathy fatigue' set in with covid, but we feel like even before covid we're already there, there's too much to care about and everyone's lost the thread. That's the last key, turning this into a movie about empathy in the chaos. The film slyly tweaks the hero's journey'story beats that audiences have come to expect, squishing and stretching a three-act structure as if the movie itself are jumping through a fracturing multiverse. That sense of infinity, all of the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, all of the tiny moving pieces underneath it stayed front of mind for us as we get a grasp on the nuts-and-bolts of the film's story. There's the family drama answer and the sci-fi answer and the philosophy answer. Or you could say it's a kung-fu flick that hops around multidimensional universes. In 2022, in an era of information overload, extreme polarization, and mass existential dread, the struggle to connect between parents and children might feel less like a banal, everyday experience, and more of an increasingly confounding battle between a loved companion and a mortal enemy.

For this type of movie, with it's wackiness, the realism of modern-day action doesn't fit well. Everything less of the bruising grit of most Hollywood action, more of the loose, playful ethos of Hong Kong-style fighting. As CGI has gotten cheaper and more accessible over the last two decades, and superhero movies have proliferated, it has become something of a cliché to destroy a major American city in the course of a fight scene. Which makes fights in "Everything" all the more distinctive, the environment and props feel as fists and feet, with a fanny pack and a perverse range of office supplies recruited as weapons. One of our favorite things to do is make people feel emotional while looking at something that's absurd. We feel this kind of mischievous joke has been pulled. While "Everything" offers a hunt of cinematic references, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "In the Mood For Love", there's something visceral about it. We're like, oh, we guess we should be more insane. That feedback, though, threatened at one point to pull them down a rabbit hole of making films that are starting to feel emptily unhinged. That self-consciousness that we feel, this feeling of wasting our lives, Watching this film definitely makes us reflect on the idea that, slipping into a Bill and Ted voice, 'like, ‘Oh yeah, kindness, sick!

Written by Gregory Mann