THE
WASHINGTON
POST
.
FRIDAY,APRIL
1, 2022
EZ
20
Movies
Jobu’s instrument of destruc-
tion — or Death Star, so to speak
— is represented as an everything
bagel. (A bagel, it should be noted,
is tennis slang for a score of zero,
not coincidentally. So the centralmetaphor of the film is one of
cosmic, zenlike opposites: all ex-
istence and all nothingness,
wrapped up together in wax pa-
per, with a schmear.)
Let it be said that “EverythingEverywhere All at Once” is irre-
futable evidence that the Daniels
have imagination and originality
to burn. I guarantee you haven’t
seen anything quite like it before.
What this movie could use a little
more of is the rigor and self-disci-
pline to pull off all the imagina-
tion and originality in a way that
does more than leave you gob-
smacked.
By one measure, “Everything”
is an exhilarating roller coaster
SEE EVERYTHING ON 23Everything Everywhere All at Once
PHOTOS BY ALLYSON RIGGS/A24
A madcap (and maddening) multiverse
BY MICHAEL O'SULLIVAN
C
ollaborative filmmakers
Daniel Kwan and Daniel
Scheinert, collectively
known as the Daniels,
have never been accused of rest-
ing on their laurels. They made a
splash with their 2014 music vid-
eo for the song “Turn Down for
What,” in which Kwan played a
character at the mercy of his
highly visible state of arousal.
Their 2016 feature debut, “Swiss
Army Man,” starred Daniel Rad-
cliffe as the titular flatulent
corpse, whose body is used as a
sort of all-purpose multitool/
friend/therapist by a suicidal
castaway (Paul Dano), who in the
process discovers a reason to live.
And their new, sci-fi-inflected
meditation on the meaning of life,
“Everything Everywhere All at
Once,” stars Michelle Yeoh as Eve-lyn, a humble laundromat opera-
tor who discovers the multiverse,
in which there are uncountable
alternate versions of her with
amazing skills that Evelyn must
learn to tap into to defeat a
malevolent being with the Star
Wars-ian name of Jobu Tupaki.
Early in the film, Jobu is identi-
fied as an “agent of chaos” by a
version of Evelyn’s husband, Way-
mond (Ke Huy Quan, whom some
may remember as Short Round
from “Indiana Jones and the Te m-
ple of Doom”). This version of
Evelyn’s s pouse, who calls himself
Alpha Waymond, has managed to
figure out how to “verse-jump”
from one reality to another, and
he has come to warn Evelyn that,
in each of the parallel worlds,
Jobu has manifested himself —
herself? itself? — in the body of
Evelyn and Waymond’s slacker
daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).Michelle Yeoh stars in the Daniels’ exhilarating,
exhausting follow-up to ‘Swiss Army Man’ABOVE: Michelle Yeoh, center,
stars as Evelyn in “Everything
Everywhere All at Once,”
alongside Stephanie Hsu, left,
and Ke Huy Quan. LEFT: Jamie
Lee Curtis plays a humorless
IRS auditor named Deirdre
Beaubeirdra. Deirdre appears
in multiple forms throughout
the multiverse, including as
Evelyn’s lover in one world
where everyone has hot dogs
for fingers.