WARNING: Spoilers
To be fair, I am a pretty big crier anyways. But this movie understood. This movie somehow traveled to the depths of my mind, pulled out everything I have ever experienced, and put it onto a screen in ways that resemble the dreams I have when I get sick and accidentally take too much Nyquil, all at once.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is an adventure and sci-fi film that explores the underlying depths of generational trauma with a race that is often overlooked: Asian Americans. The A24-produced film recently got its first Academy Award nominations, and currently stands tall on the Rotten Tomatoes website with a strong score of 95%. What stands out to me the most about this film, however, is how it accurately captures something so real and deep in an overall goofy, cinematic, and uncomfortably humorous and out-of-this-world satirical theme. Oh, also, there’s an entire multiverse plotline. Think Marvel but hitting a little too close to home.
The film follows Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant mother. In the real world, she runs a laundromat and lives in the upstairs apartment with her husband and daughter. However, throughout the movie, she tries to save the world by stepping into the different lives that she could have had. Here’s the twist. In every multiverse, she fights the ultimate “enemy” and “villain:” Her very own daughter, Joy. Oh, and Joy’s goal? To vacuum the entire world into an everything bagel. I can’t make this up, you just have to go watch the movie for yourself.
Growing up in an Asian household, I didn’t think anybody would quite understand how one operated until I saw this movie. Anybody including myself.
Evelyn’s father seems to have expectations for her that she just can’t seem to quite reach, even though she has opened a business and immigrated to a completely new country. Joy has to bear it all, and can’t seem to take the coldness from her mother, which leaves her mother confused and even angrier.
The strained mother-daughter relationship that is seen but often not acknowledged in Asian-American households was portrayed perfectly in this film. Throughout the multiverse, Joy has the desire to not only kill her mother but also end the entire universe, since the type of love she’s received from her mom lacked so much compassion and empathy it emptied the last of whatever Joy had of it too.
Evelyn’s choices that disappointed her father (marrying a husband he disapproved of and moving to America), are now placed onto Joy. As Joy chases her mom out of the laundromat, with tears welling in her eyes, asking her mom why she can’t accept the fact that she’s a lesbian and that her partner is a girl, her mom replies with a simple, “You’re getting fat.”
Evelyn doesn’t understand her own feelings and is only able to tell her daughter what she knows. She is only able to tell her daughter what she thinks will help.
By the end of the film, Evelyn and Joy have an intense fight, slowly understanding one another. Their voices, arguments and tone changes are represented by every physical movement that they hurl toward each other. When Joy is finally able to consume everything into the black hole (the everything bagel), Evelyn understands. She saves herself, the universe and everything in the universe all at once. She tells her daughter she loves her.