Everything Everywhere All at Once, and a laundromat at the end of the multiverse
Everything Everywhere All at Once · Daniels · 2022
It should not work. A film about a middle-aged laundromat owner audited by the IRS, who learns to access infinite parallel selves, told in a barrage of genres and googly eyes — it should collapse under its own invention.
Instead the chaos is the argument. The Daniels build a universe of infinite possibility precisely so they can conclude that nihilism is the easy answer and kindness the difficult, deliberate one. The everything bagel is despair; the googly eye is hope, and the film knows how silly that sounds.
In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.
Michelle Yeoh holds the whole spinning thing together, and Ke Huy Quan's Waymond — sweet, anxious, quietly heroic — delivers the film's thesis in a single line about fighting with kindness.
It's exhausting and overstuffed and I cried twice. Sometimes the maximalist swing is the honest one.
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