Everything Everywhere All At Once

The title Everything Everywhere All At Once describes what the movie tries to be, which is exactly what everyone with a Wi-Fi connection is compelled to be. On the one hand, it can all be boiled down to: a self-absorbed mother learns how to tell her plugged-in daughter to get off her phone so they can spend quality time together as a family. But, in order to get to that point, the directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a.k.a., the “Daniels”), faithfully reproduce the symptoms of being extremely online.

They do this by attaching multiverse plumbing to the kitchen-sink drama. As a literary device, with philosophical underpinnings, the multiverse is a fascinating evolution from the old concept of the Utopia—an imaginative leap from the notion that there is a pathway to progress to something like an acceptance that anything could be, and is just as likely to be, true. It is both more open-minded and less idealistic than the old paradigm.

Utopias were a blueprint that could be followed—and that we were often encouraged to follow; parallel universes, each existing simultaneously, are hardly prescriptive. They offer no guaranteed outcomes in part because, if each of us has an infinite variety of selves, all shaped by an infinite variety of circumstances, we have no agency. Happenstance shapes our fate. But storytellers such as the Daniels cleverly bypass this constraint on free will by revealing the structure of the cosmos to their characters. In Everything, the Wang family jumps from one dimension to another; Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) has been conscripted by the Alphaverse version of her meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) to—spoiler alert!—stop a parallel version of their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) from obliterating the whole shebang.