Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

Elevator Pitch: Evelyn Quan Wang and her husband Waymond run a Laundromat. There is tension between them and Waymond is trying to get Evelyn to accept divorce papers. They have to visit the IRS, in the person of Deirdre who is auditing them and has a particular problem with a bill for a karaoke machine. This Part One – Everything. Their daughter Joy is trying to get them to accept the fact that she is a Lesbian. Somehow (I’m having to refer to Wikipedia now) Evelyn becomes aware that because of her life choices there are other versions of her and everyone associated with her and she is forced to defend herself from attackers in alternative realities. So later maybe in Part 2 Evelyn and Deirdre are partners in a world where everyone has hot dog fingers, and later she and Joy (I think) are rocks.

Content: There is no sex or nudity although male genitalia would be visible if it had not been pixelated out. Almost endless martial arts, very occasionally time is spent in what we might call the real world. Where the characters are a couple of rocks I quite liked it, it was briefly quiet. Evelyn eventually ends up in the Alpha world where Alpha Joy is in charge and can destroy the universe. Quite a lot of the dialogue in Mandarin with subtitles, in my case Spanish. In the world where peoples’ fingers are hot dog sausages Deirdre plays the piano with her feet. 

A View: Well, this film much liked by both the general public and the critics to the point that it is No 115 on the IMDb favourites list. In the screen where we saw it there were a number of young people who seemed to enjoy it, and I admit I was attracted by the whole multi-verse idea, so my problem was that it was not presented in a way I liked. Hence I am one of those who would suggest that if you don’t really like martial arts you should give it a miss. Now in March 2023 it has, amazingly, won in seven categories at the Oscars.

If we group this film with other “alternative reality” presentations others in the same genre reviewed here include: Yesterday, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Transcendence.