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Everything Everywhere All at Once, review: delivers on the title's promise - and not in a good way

Stephanie Hsu in a scene from Everything Everywhere All at Once - Allyson Riggs
Stephanie Hsu in a scene from Everything Everywhere All at Once - Allyson Riggs

Try this for a Multiverse of Madness: the cinematic equivalent of a washing machine rattling through every cycle simultaneously. Pinning a genre on Everything Everywhere All at Once is tough enough even without a blindfold – Wikipedia calls it “an absurdist science-fiction comedy-drama action film”, and that’s just for starters. It is maybe not a musical or a western, but most other bases are pretty much covered.

The writer-directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, build their conceit out from the recognisable core of a kitchen-sink drama, with a Chinese family in California, already stressed to the eyeballs, facing a gruelling tax audit for their launderette business.

Out of nowhere, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is offered a cosmic escape route by her divorce-seeking husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who is able to guide her in and out of parallel universes with a bluetooth headset, and explains that out of all the world’s possible Evelyns, she got the roughest deal.

In other realities, she was a film star, a kung fu legend – Michelle Yeoh, essentially. Meanwhile, their disgruntled lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has gained trippy superpowers and is killing off every iteration of her mother she can find. A frumpy tax inspector called Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) is coming for Evelyn in one lifetime; in another, these two are a couple, and like the rest of the human race, they have hot dogs instead of fingers.

There’s plenty more, to the nth power, where this kind of Douglas-Adams-ish zaniness came from. The film pings around with so many bright (and not-so-bright) ideas that the main enemy it faces, in just about any of its competing realities, is sheer overload.

Kwan and Scheinert (who have been known to dub themselves “Daniels”, and ought to cut that out) proved they could see an absolutely nuts conceit over the finish line in their surprisingly engaging 2016 debut Swiss Army Man – the one with Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse. That film committed to one berserk idea, though. Falling comparatively short of its much grander, all-things-to-all-people ambitions, Everything Everywhere… is essentially a Swiss Army movie. Some gadgets are a lot more use than others.

Which parts land entertainingly and which get trying, over an obviously excessive runtime, will be a different equation for everyone. In the corner of its multiverse I was sitting in, a lot of the stuff surrounding Hsu’s character went askew – particularly the cosmology she has to sell us of an “everything bagel” (literally, a giant evil breadstuff with all the toppings) threatening universal destruction. Hsu’s slightly self-impressed performance isn’t the asset it could be, either.

The other performers come up trumps, though: when the film makes emotional sense, it’s down to them. Yeoh has heroic stamina from first to last, and manages to convince across an epic span of life experiences without heavy make-up coming into play. She’s a wizard at fatigue but also at an age-defying, electric physicality.

Quan – a near-complete stranger to films since his utterly disarming Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) – remains a champ, every bit as sympathetic as he was in that. And Curtis, wearing a fright wig and mustard knitwear you can practically smell, creates a grotesque cartoon of a person, hilariously repellent at the start, strangely lovable by the end.

You could keep tallying the pros and cons all day – it’s that kind of wildly up-and-down experience. Unsurprisingly, it already has an army of cultish adorers, and a competing squad of sceptics who flat-out can’t abide it. The brewing, Matrix-esque “multiversal battle” in the Internal Revenue Service office – a location which gets tiring on the eye – is just about enough to stop the film splintering into a forest of tangents, but only just.

Depending on where you’re sat, Kwan and Scheinert either pirouette neatly back to the starting line, or test your patience in the draggy finishing stretch, which hammers home route-one consolations about recognising the beauty in what we have.

It feels like we’ve waded through an awful lot of hectic derangement to make do with that as take-home wisdom. I’ve rarely felt more impaled on the fence by a film, because, exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim.


15 cert, 139 min. In cinemas now