Everything Everywhere All at Once
2022 · Directed by Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan
Original language: English
- action
- adventure
- science fiction
The story
An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save what's important to her by connecting with the lives she could have led in other universes.
What it’s like
Frantic, maximalist and tactile: hand-held camera darting through cramped spaces, a laundromat's fluorescent hum and sickly green-white tubes giving way to shifts into glossy neon, bagel-shaped sci-fi sets, claymation-like absurdity and sudden stretches of stillness. Colour is saturated and deliberately uneven, with grain and lens smears that feel like a home movie gone cosmic, while the score swings between bouncy synth pulses, tender piano and sudden swells of pop. The vibe is chaotic warmth with a melancholy undertow, a sprawling family-under-pressure story that turns absurd and then unexpectedly sincere. Pacing is relentless in the action sequences and loose and conversational between them, so it suits a late-night watch with friends or a restless evening when you want to be overwhelmed. Its people are a tired, overextended mother and her estranged daughter and husband, slowly finding their way back to each other through an endless barrage of surreal chaos. Intensity is high in kinetic martial-arts fighting, with frequent cartoonish bursts of violence that stay stylised rather than gory, some strong language, brief sexual innuendo and an unsettling, nihilistic edge. It is for viewers who enjoy inventive genre filmmaking, sharp absurdist humour and emotional payoff after a lot of noise.
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