Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Laundry and the Infinite

I don’t know how to do my taxes. (I can barely sort receipts without feeling my throat tighten.) So when Evelyn Wang sits across from an IRS auditor early in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s *Everything Everywhere All at Once*, that suffocating dread feels painfully real. The overhead fluorescents have that sick, bureaucratic yellow that makes everyone look a little unwell. Evelyn—Michelle Yeoh playing her with exhausted stiffness—isn’t just buried in paperwork. She’s buried in her own life: a failing laundromat, a husband trying to serve divorce papers, a daughter drifting away, and a father who never quite treated her as enough. It’s such a mundane, grinding kind of misery, and the film keeps us in that cramped cubicle long enough to feel the oxygen thinning.



And then the universe cracks. The Daniels—whose last feature had Paul Dano riding a flatulent corpse like a jet ski—aren’t going to leave this as a kitchen-sink drama. They fling Evelyn into a multiverse madhouse where she has to borrow skills from alternate versions of herself to keep reality from collapsing. The film starts sprinting. Evelyn ricochets through lives where she’s a glamorous movie star, a teppanyaki chef, and, yes, someone with hot dogs for fingers. It’s funny and relentless and, at times, genuinely tiring. More than once I wondered if it was trying to outrun its own feelings, pelting us with googly eyes and butt plugs so we don’t notice the ache underneath. I’m also not sure the back-half pacing fully holds; the climax goes on a touch too long, stuck in its own feedback loop of frantic invention.



Still, beneath all that confetti-bomb chaos, the movie is doing something surprisingly quiet. The New York Times' A.O. Scott nailed it when he called it "a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love." The sci-fi machinery is basically camouflage for a story about generational trauma. Joy (Stephanie Hsu), Evelyn’s daughter, becomes the film’s antagonist—an all-powerful being who’s seen everything and decides nothing matters. The way Hsu lets her face go blank in the middle of cosmic mayhem feels uncannily familiar: the posture of a depressed young person who can’t carry her family’s expectations another inch.



The film’s sweetest sleight of hand might be Ke Huy Quan. Watching him as Waymond, Evelyn’s relentlessly kind husband, is its own kind of marvel. Quan stepped away from acting for two decades after Hollywood didn’t know what to do with the kid from *Indiana Jones* once he grew up, and that real absence seems to echo inside his performance. His Waymond is gentle, small, and always asking for kindness in a world that reads that as weakness. When he finally lays out his desperate case—that his softness is a strategy, not a flaw—his voice splinters and his shoulders fold in. It isn’t a victory pose. It’s what survival looks like when you refuse to become cruel. I can’t shake the way he keeps smiling through it. You don’t need a multiverse to understand that kind of resilience. Sometimes it’s just waking up and deciding to do the laundry.