Film review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

The multiverse is back in this divisive cult hit

The Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé has long used his films “to shock and to disturb”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. So far, he’s done “gross-out violence” (I Stand Alone), explicit sex (Love) and also sexual violence (Irreversible). This film contains not a single “shot of excess”, and yet it might well be the director’s “most disturbing” yet. Françoise Lebrun and the Italian director Dario Argento play an elderly couple – identified simply as Lui and Elle – who are stumbling “painfully” towards the end of their lives in their poky flat in Paris. He is a writer with heart problems, and she is a psychiatrist who may have dementia. Sitting somewhere between Amour and The Father, the film is a “brilliantly executed” meditation on “the fate that awaits us all – decrepitude and death”.

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