Contains spoilers.
I had a great time with Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“The struggles and love of an Asian American immigrant family” isn’t a novel premise; there are plenty of films that cover it. But this movie doesn’t lay that card on the table at the start. Through the first half it runs like a hero story: Evelyn, a seemingly ordinary laundromat owner, is suddenly tasked with saving the universe from the villain Jobu Tupaki. Up to that point it even feels like a breezy action movie.
Then we learn that Jobu Tupaki is Evelyn’s daughter. The “save the universe” battle is, in truth, a fight with her child. The way the film layers a cosmic threat over immigrant family conflict is striking. It’s exaggerated, yet it doesn’t feel like exaggeration.
The story keeps leaping across multiverses, and the genre shifts with each jump. Music, lighting, characters’ personalities, and even acting tone all change. It feels like several films woven together. A movie like this could easily fly off the rails or exhaust the audience, but this one rides the edge deftly. The genre keeps morphing, yet one through-line stays intact. It seems to flare out, then fold back in, then flare again.
The climax left the deepest impression. At the moment when the film could shout the loudest, it chooses silence—cutting the sound and delivering dialogue only through subtitles. That quiet shows, plainly, the emptiness after a fight. Because it doesn’t pound the emotion, the feeling lingers longer.
If Christopher Nolan made stories intriguing by cross-cutting time in films like Memento, Dunkirk, and Tenet, the Daniels use metaphor and the multiverse to swap genres entirely. It feels like formalism pushed a step further: they play boldly with form yet never drop the emotions they want to convey.
A tired theme can still feel new when told this way. This film proved that to me.