Everything Everywhere All at Once is the kind of movie that struts into your life, slaps you in the face with a sex toy, and then sends you spinning into existential questions like tumbling, philosophical laundry. It is described by its co-creators, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, as a type of “maximalism” film - about as big and ambitious as it gets. And with a title like that, nothing else would do. This movie artfully bridges the gap between summer blockbusters and arthouse cinema, and has quickly become appraised as the best movie of 2022 so far.

It’s only the second movie that Kwan and Scheinert, known together as “the Daniels”, have ever made. They first became noticed for their bizarre and impressive music videos, such as Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What”. But their breakout movie was the fantastically strange and strangely moving Swiss Army Man, in which Paul Dano plays a man trapped on an island with a talking, farting corpse, played by Daniel Radcliffe, as his only companion - it’s better than it sounds. But for many people it was not quite a palatable movie, and the directors felt the message they wanted to convey was missed because of that. As they said in an interview with RogerEbert.com, the mixed response to Swiss Army Man is what made them want to make this movie.

The reception for Everything Everywhere All at Once was ecstatic. It is A24’s highest-grossing movie ever, has already won numerous awards, and is primed to impress at the Oscars. The New York Times called it a “swirl of genre anarchy”, and a “bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.” As the Daniels described it themselves in the RogerEbert.com interview, “We wanted this movie to be… what It’s a Wonderful Life was for Christmas, and Groundhog’s Day was for ‘Groundhog’s Day,’ [sic] this is a tax day movie.” And yes, the base of the movie begins with the pointless drudgery of taxes and laundry.

The plot is focused around Evelyn, played by the wonderful Michelle Yeoh, who is introduced to multiple universes and different versions of herself while trying to sort out a tax audit on her laundromat business. She and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu); her father Gong Gong (James Hong), and the IRS agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) work together, or fight one another, across multiple realities as the plot carries them towards the end of the movie.

It is perhaps Michelle Yeoh’s best performance of her career, with Vanity Fair saying that “Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve and growing curiosity,” and that she “makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping.” Originally this character was going to be the husband, played by Jackie Chan, and the decision to go with Michelle Yeoh as the lead character instead is perhaps the best decision the Daniels made out of the entire film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the concepts of infinite possibilities to the highest extreme of any film to date. As co-creator Kwan said in an interview with Vulture, “The multiverse became a vessel for us to point at infinity in a way that most other premises probably wouldn’t allow for.” Kwan and Scheinert were inspired to make a multiverse movie by many things in their lives - from movies like The Matrix, Princess Mononoke, and Satoshi Kon’s anime, to their own nihilistic leanings, to Vonnegut and slapstick humor and absurdism, to the moving power of kindness and love. They took their inspirations, their questions about life, their fears and motivations, and poured them into this movie. The result is a beautiful, chaotic struggle of the search for meaning in a meaningless existence.

So what are some of the ways these themes are represented in the movie?

***SPOILERS AHEAD!!!