Film review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

published 19 May 2022

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In the US and elsewhere, the critics have swooned over Everything Everywhere All at Once. So it was “disconcerting” to find it a bit of a dud – “frantically hyperactive” and also rather dull, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The veteran action star Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a downtrodden Chinese immigrant to the US who runs a “scuzzy” laundromat with her dopey husband (Ke Huy Quan). But just as a tax audit threatens to make her life yet tougher, she discovers that there are a host of alternate realities in which her life has turned out better: in one of the worlds she visits, she is a martial arts expert; in another she’s a movie star. The entire multiverse is in peril, however, and only Evelyn can save it. It sounds fun and there are some “nice gags”, but the film boils down to a “mad succession of consequence-free events”, which goes at such a clip you never care about the characters. I found it “a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time”.

It’s not perfect, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. It does feel messy, “overstuffed and a trifle exhausting” – but it’s also “exhilarating, funny and moving”. Admittedly, the multiverse idea is hardly new: it was taken for a spin in Marvel’s most recent Doctor Strange movie; but this film has “a gajillion times” more warmth and wit, and is made by two writer-directors who seem to be fizzing with creativity, at a time when cinema feels “starved of fresh ideas”.