Written by Andreas Babiolakis

This review is a part of the Best Picture Project: a review of every single Academy Award winner for the Best Picture category. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the ninety fifth Best Picture winner at the 2022 Academy Awards.

If last year’s Best Picture Winner, CODA, encapsulated life in a simplistic story that everyone could relate to, then the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is a similar vision but through an absurdist lens. How do you capture all of the feelings, sensations, and tales of the world into one film about a family that owns a laundromat that is on the verge of being seized? You break out into the multiple universes of existence, of course. The film caught onto the zeitgeist of multiverse stories (they’re all the rage now, but perhaps just in our timeline), and what the general masses of the world got instead of the same-old, same-old is a generational, seismic story of the rift between a woman and her daughter. Whether you can make any sense of the film (or figure out why there has to be butt-plug-shaped awards that conveniently go into one guy’s ass), we can all identify with the feeling that we want to be loved, appreciated, and respected for who we are. There’s a clever statement on identity here, given the fact that the Wang family may take on different lives in alternate timelines but they all are driven by their exact same spirits. Matriarch Evelyn Quan Wang is headstrong no matter where you find her; she may be a leader in one timeline or afraid of conflict in another, but she will speak her mind anywhere and everywhere.

Evelyn doesn’t know that husband, Waymond, is moments away from passing her a divorce document, as they’ve not really discussed the subject; they’re too busy trying to make their struggling laundromat stay afloat. That’s far from the little that she knows, and we learn that quite quickly when a different Waymond approaches her and informs that all of existence is endangered, and she is the only person that can help (let alone the only Evelyn Quan Wang). Who is threatening to destroy everything as we know it? Jobu Tupaki: an all-powerful being that also happens to be Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, Joy, who wants to eradicate all of humanity across every timeline. Don’t we all feel like it’s the end of the world when things don’t go our way? Here’s the cinematic equivalent of that melodramatic feeling, but the way that both Daniels (directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) frame this never downplays the seriousness of the moment. Are we overreacting? Sure, but it doesn’t feel like it when everything crumbles around us. The Daniels somehow portray the exact levels of ridiculousness and severity of escalating dread; nothing is over, but it sure as hell feels like everything is.

Despite how stupid this film could have been (and it has the recipe to be a silly, pointless exercise in randomness), the Daniels instead craft one of the more meaningful films of 2022 that speaks to nearly everybody. How do you think this awards season takeover happened? The film came out last April! Not once did it let down, and there’s a reason for that: this is a rare film to affect almost all of its viewers. Casual cinephiles have a lot of fun with the crazy action sequences. Weirdos (like myself; I’m not judging) will be baffled that a film with dildos and other random shit pulled off a Best Picture win. The heart and soul of this picture will speak to everyone. We only get one life and a set series of chances to make it right. Clearly, no one lives a perfect life, even if we believe that they have; everyone has their own history they wish they could change. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a statement that no one gets it right in the grand scheme of things, but we have to make sure that we did right by us and our loved ones.

Everyone from the crew (from only a handful of visual effects artists to the immense amount of work placed into the myriad of costumes and sets) to the cast (Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan at their very best, and everyone around them having fun and/or giving their all) placed nothing but love and perseverance into this motion picture. It shows. To me, Best Picture does not label just the supposed best film of the year according to the Academy, but the film that is made up of all of the best parts. If we’re looking at the Academy Awards’ makeup, it’s a series of congratulations to most elements that make up the art of cinema; shouldn’t Best Picture honour the film that is the best composed in this way? Whether you think Everything Everywhere All at Once is the best film of 2022 or not (I personally don’t, but I do love it), you can’t say that it wasn’t the most impactful film of the year, nor that it was poorly made. Sometimes the oddities of life are what unite us all; we think we are lone wolves experiencing these events, but they’re shared in a strangely universal sense.

While my minor complaint is that some of the universes don’t make complete sense, they also don’t have to; if there are timelines where these universes don’t make sense, then there are ones where they do. The fact that a number of these timelines are given full story arcs — from a reality where we have sausages for fingers, to one where Raccaccoonie exists — and are made to matter is astounding. Think about it. How many other filmmakers would have just settled with the absurdity and made us deal with these brief glimpses of silliness? I would argue most. The Daniels didn’t set out to make a strange film. They wanted to make a powerful one in their own unique way. Everything Everywhere All at Once reads like something intangible on paper, but it rings like a classic Pixar film: a continuous tugging of your heartstrings in ways you didn’t think were possible before.

The film is cleverly split into three chapters: one where Evelyn experiences every timeline, and one where she is able to be present in all realities. The final chapter is very brief: it’s a rushing of all storylines, ideas, entities, and beliefs “all at once”. It’s the final cherry on top: a reminder that we will never experience everything that is out there, or even in our own world. It’s the final say, and proof that the Daniels had a set idea from the start: the attempt to capture endlessness. Given the film’s duration (a fairly standard length of two hours and twenty minutes, I’d say), clearly not everything was explored, but that’s kind of the point. May this be the be-all-end-all of multiverse films. We’ve learned that there are many issues with the theme, and not enough storytellers are exploring it remotely nearly enough. The Daniels have done a noble job here that makes sense as the closure on this obsession, especially now that it has won Best Picture. Think about it. This has to be the most out-there Best Picture winner ever; it’s got everything from a universe with sentient rocks to a fight where battlers have to shove trophies up their asses. I think we’re in a fascinating timeline.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.