“You are not unlovable. There is always something to love.”
― Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
One of my favourite things about movies is how they manage to immerse you entirely. There are always those few moments after the film is over ― when the screen fades to black ― and you realize that you’ve been holding your breath the whole time. This spring, as I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once in theatres and saw the end credits appear, I felt more than just the classic sense of awe. The theatre was pin-drop silent as the lights came back on, and there was a part of me that wanted to sink into my seat and stay there forever ― all due to the sheer weight of what I had just watched. As I walked out of that theatre, I knew that this would be a movie that’d stick with me for more than just a couple of days.
There’s truly no synopsis I could provide for this film, as any attempt to summarize it would do it no justice. From parallel universes to sausages for fingers, it really is everything, everywhere, all at once: a stretching, all-encompassing mess of a movie.
And yet ― here is an attempt anyways:
Everything Everywhere All At Once focuses on Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who owns a laundromat with her husband Waymond and daughter Joy. The film introduces the concept of a multiverse, and Evelyn must connect to versions of herself from alternate timelines in order to save the world.
This is a film that explores lost potential, and your worst fear coming true: that the version of you that exists now is not enough. It’s a story of uprooting your life, all the people you disappoint and all the things you leave behind. It’s a story about all the ways in which mothers and daughters hurt each other: tense silences and holding back tears during car rides, words that cut too deep and words that are too big to say out loud. It reminds us that we are small, desperate things, struggling to stay alive in a universe that ignores our existence.
But it’s also just a story about a family.
“Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.”
― Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
It’s about falling in love, and having that be enough. It’s about a mother and daughter trying to find each other through time and space. It’s about naiveté that isn’t really naiveté after all. It’s about seeing the world in all its truth and choosing to love it anyways; learning to be kind because that’s the only way you know how to survive. It’s about finding meaning in the meaningless; recognizing that our insignificance to the universe is a blessing, not a curse.
Because, at the end of the day, there’s something special in searching for the people you love in every universe, and still choosing them each and every time. In realizing that, perhaps a love like that is enough to make our tiny existences mean something; knowing what’s out there and finding joy in the mundane, anyways. There’s something special in the fact that nothing matters until we let it. At the bottom of it all, it’s a story about a mother and a daughter, a chef and a raccoon, a husband and a revenue service inspector, planets crashing and googly eyes and rocks falling off of cliffs.
And that’s to say ― it’s a story about love.