The story
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) is the Daniels' — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's — Oscar-sweeping multiverse film about Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a middle-aged Chinese-American immigrant who runs a failing laundromat in Simi Valley with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is preparing to host her exacting father Gong Gong (James Hong) for a Lunar New Year party, is being audited by the IRS, and cannot bring herself to introduce her daughter Joy's (Stephanie Hsu) girlfriend Becky as Joy's girlfriend. The film opens at a domestic pitch — receipts on the kitchen table, customer complaints in the laundromat, a marriage in which Waymond is quietly carrying divorce papers Evelyn has not yet been told about — before tipping into one of the most formally ambitious science-fiction premises of the 2020s.
The plot is set in motion during the family's IRS appointment with auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). In the elevator on the way to the office, Waymond is suddenly possessed by 'Alpha Waymond' — a verse-jumping version of himself from the Alphaverse, the universe that first developed multiverse-jumping technology. Alpha Waymond explains that a multiversal threat called Jobu Tupaki is hunting Evelyn across realities, that Evelyn specifically is the multiverse's last hope, and that to fight back she must verse-jump: perform unlikely actions that connect her temporarily to versions of herself in other universes and let her import their skills.
The middle of the film is a maximalist tour through Evelyn's other possible lives. She visits movie-star Evelyn (the version who never left China and became a Hong Kong action film legend, modelled on Michelle Yeoh's real career), kung-fu-master Evelyn, opera-singer Evelyn, hot-dog-fingers Evelyn (a universe where evolution went sideways), Pixar-rat Evelyn, and finally rock-Evelyn (a universe where life never evolved past geology). Each verse-jump arms her for the laundromat-IRS fight Alpha Waymond has dragged her into, but each one also forces her to look at the life she rejected and the life she chose.
Jobu Tupaki, when revealed, is not a foreign multiversal entity. Jobu is Joy. In the Alphaverse, Alpha-Evelyn pushed her daughter to verse-jump too hard; instead of dying, Alpha-Joy's mind fractured and now experiences every universe simultaneously. The accumulated weight of being everywhere has driven Jobu to nihilism, and she has built the 'everything bagel' — a black-hole-like artefact made of every object in every universe — as a door she can step through to stop existing. The film's central reveal is that Jobu has not been hunting Evelyn to kill her. She has been hunting her because she wants her mother to verse-jump with her into nothingness.
The third act is Evelyn's rejection of Jobu's invitation and her acceptance of the alternate-Waymond philosophy she had previously dismissed: 'we have to be kind, especially when we don't know what's going on.' Evelyn re-enters the laundromat-IRS conflict not as a fighter but as a healer, defusing her enemies — security guards, IRS bureaucrats, the chef with the raccoon puppet — by meeting them with the small kindnesses Waymond models. In the rock universe she finally listens to Joy's exhaustion without the multiverse distracting either of them. At the bagel itself, she grabs Joy's wrist and tells her that of every universe she has now seen, she would still choose this one.
The film ends back at Deirdre's IRS office. The Wang family refiles their taxes; Deirdre is warmer; Gong Gong accepts Becky as Joy's girlfriend; the laundromat will be okay. In the final shot Evelyn briefly verse-jumps mid-sentence — catching glimpses of her other lives — and then returns. She has not stopped seeing the multiverse. She has chosen to live in this universe anyway.
Setting & tone
Everything Everywhere All at Once is set in United States of America and works primarily in Cantonese. Tonally it sits in Action, Adventure, Science Fiction, drawing on the conventions of each while filtering them through Daniel Scheinert's direction.
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