Everything Everywhere All at Once is Simply Fantastical

It's the big-time Oscar-winning film everyone’s talking about. It’s a film that’s surprisingly both meaningful and nonsensical. It’s a film that had me sobbing like a baby when I first saw it in theaters. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Photo Credit: A24 Films

How does a title sum up a film so perfectly?

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself. As I write this review, curled up at my desk in the midst of finals season, tissues lay strewn about from the aftermath of rewatching this incredible two-hour film. It takes a lot for me to pay attention to something for that long. 

Why this film?

When I look at it, I see myself. I’m reminded of the little girl I once was, that my mother once was, and where she’s hidden after all these years. I think of what life my parents would have lived had they never left the Philippines – would my mother have become an accountant like she wanted? Would she still have chosen a tiny apartment in the suburbs, doing paperwork for a healthcare company and sleeping alone once my father leaves for the night shift? What would my friends look like if I went to school there? Would I even like it there?

And so on.

The multiverse is made real, tangible, and above all, possible in Everything Everywhere All at Once. That’s no small feat. 

From the strained conversations to the disappointments to the exhaustion from endless fighting – all of it resonates. When you take away the verse-jumping and the sausage fingers and the googly eye-rocks, what’s at the core of this film is a family. One with enough cracks and rips that it shouldn’t even be standing. But it does. It persists.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

In the film’s musing of existentialism, its humor is shaded by generational trauma. The absurdity of it all is given substance by the candidness of its storytelling. It unashamedly follows the struggles of an immigrant family that has fallen out of love with one another. As someone who identifies with Joy’s experience – numb from hopes of reconnection and acceptance crushed over and over – the film painfully struck my heart chords.

And what saves the universe? Forgiveness.

Complexity and yet stunning simplicity are characteristics that explain why Everything Everywhere All at Once is now the most awarded of all time.

The fantasy aspect of this film propels it to greatness, not obscurity. So does its cast of talented and renowned actors, from Michelle Yeoh to Jamie Lee Curtis to Ke Huy Quan. 

And while their awards won at the Oscars just earlier this month were monumental (and historic), they are reminders of how little time Asian-Americans do have their moments in the spotlight. 

Photo Credit: Getty Images

For nearly a century, less than 2% of Academy Award nominees were women-of-color. Only 3 women of color have won in the category of “Best Actress”. The last Asian to win “Best Supporting Actor” since Quan was awarded in 1985. 

It is no secret Hollywood has a diversity problem, not only in the stories it deems important enough to tell, but in the people cast to portray them. With the recent popularity of films like Parasite, Crazy Rich Asians, and Shang-Chi, that seems to be changing. 

It is undeniably an Asian-American film, and yet the film is so much more than that. 

“This is history in the making, “ says, Michelle Yeoh, Oscar-winning actress.

“They say stories like this only happen in the movies,” says Ke Huy Quan, Oscar-winning actor.

They do say life imitates art.