Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Courtesy A24.
A stack of receipts is waiting, the laundromat needs attention and Evelyn Wang is running out of patience with her family. Everything Everywhere All at Once begins with jobs she cannot finish before giving her an infinite number of other lives to worry about. For Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn, the multiverse arrives at a moment when an ordinary afternoon already feels impossible to manage.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's 2022 film makes each alternate Evelyn a particularly cruel comparison. One has a career she never pursued; another seems to have escaped the decisions that left her here. Watching those possibilities through Yeoh's face, we can see discovery becoming regret. The extraordinary skills she acquires do little to make her more attentive to the people standing next to her.
The leaps are frantic, but their construction was deliberate. In a March 2022 Filmmaker interview, Kwan explained that even some of the cuts between universes were already on the page. Scheinert said they stayed closer to this script than they had on Swiss Army Man. They needed the silly ideas and intimate scenes to work together before bringing in the rest of the team.
That preparation matters whenever the film returns to Joy. Stephanie Hsu's daughter wants her mother to acknowledge the person she is, including her relationship with Becky. Evelyn keeps measuring what she sees against an expectation of what her daughter's life should look like. Their arguments make the alternate universes feel personal: another possible life can become a reason to dismiss the one someone is actually living.
Ke Huy Quan's Waymond offers a different way through those encounters. His apparent softness is easy for Evelyn to mistake for helplessness. Yet paying attention, calming a room and giving another person a chance are things he repeatedly manages while she is preparing for a fight. Quan lets those gestures register as choices, rather than treating his character's kindness as an absence of understanding.
The film keeps bringing its spectacle back to that family. Evelyn can borrow abilities from countless selves, but knowing how to do something is different from listening to Joy or noticing Waymond. Under the rapid cuts and physical comedy, Yeoh has to make that slower adjustment visible. The life at the laundromat is still untidy, demanding and shared with other people. It is also the one in which she can answer them.
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