"Everything Everywhere All at Once" is a non-linear thrill ride that made some
confused viewers pull all of their hair out, all at once. Looking for
answers? Here's a handy guide to the film's most head-scratching concepts.
After the basics of the film's multiversal plot line are explained,
the alternate Waymond has to extradite Evelyn from a dangerous situation using
impressive and unexpected martial arts prowess. Before doing so,
he retrieves a tube of lip balm from his fanny pack and chews it, unlocking his abilities.
It turns out that people who hop between universes can access skillsets possessed by alternate
versions of themselves by finding the universe where a version of them knows how to do the
relevant task. In order to make a connection with whatever universe the necessary skills are from,
the user must perform something random enough to channel said universe's probability wavelength.
At first, these "random events" are simple enough: Eating lip balm, giving yourself a
specific number of paper cuts, and professing love for someone who is trying to kill you all
qualify. But as the film progresses, the skills and the work necessary get stranger and stranger.
The process of hopping through universes is delicate and takes
a lot of time and training to hone. Evelyn is very new to all of this,
and the circumstances do not afford her the luxury of lengthy instruction.
As such, she fails early on when she tries to access a universe that can make her a
better fighter. Instead of gaining skills, she accidentally connects to a world where
everyone has long, bendy, cylindrical fingers that are exactly as goofy as they sound.
"You're living your worst you."
"I cannot be the worst. What about the hot dog one?"
As the film explains, a particular aberration causes each universe to branch off on its own.
Every time Evelyn is shown one of these branches, she can see exactly where in her life she moved
away from the path and created it. But this particular universe is hand-waved away as being
inexplicable — it's just a world where, somehow, humans evolved to have hands with hot dog fingers.
This is initially played for laughs. But in subsequent scenes, we return to this alternate
world, where Evelyn is in a relationship with an alternate version of Deirdre,
her IRS auditor. This big, broad joke turns out to contain real catharsis and a sweet metaphor
about how even in a world where we have hot dogs for fingers, we get better at using our feet.
One of the more straightforward universes Evelyn encounters is the one she draws the bulk of her
martial arts skill from. It's a version of her life where she never left China with her
future husband Waymond, and wound up meeting a teacher who relentlessly trained her to be
a skilled fighter. She became so talented, in fact, that she moved to Hollywood and
became a huge movie star renowned for her work in action films — not unlike Michelle Yeoh herself.
At a point in the film's runtime that could reasonably serve as an endpoint,
Evelyn "dies," and the credits begin to actually roll. They're the real credits, crediting the
real filmmakers, which sells this moment as the saddest ending to a movie imaginable,
before pulling out to reveal that in the Hollywood Evelyn timeline, the movie premiere she has been
at this whole time is for the movie we've been watching, which follows the main Evelyn's journey.
"Where is she? Where's our daughter?"
"What daughter?"
This fake-out works incredibly well, because "Everything Everywhere All
at Once" is longer than similar films. Its faux ending is thus conceivable — and all the
more so because the plot has already seeded the Hollywood angle so well.
In the Hollywood Evelyn universe, this version of our heroine runs into the Waymond she hasn't
seen since they broke up in her youth. She's astonished to see him looking well,
having assumed he grew destitute from financial failure in America without her there to steer
and motivate him. But this Waymond seems healthy, successful, and strangely at peace.
Many of the alternate worlds Evelyn has seen seem better than her own:
She's happier in them because she didn't get married, didn't have a family,
and didn't end up taking care of the father who made her this way.
"Where is my breakfast? Quickly, food!"
But this universe plunges further into the film's "What if?" premise to show the
folly inherent in its perspective. It's also one of the most important strands
of the film's tightly-woven third act, because it's key to reminding Evelyn why
she fell for Waymond in the first place. Even in a world where she abandoned him,
he's still willing to give them another shot, because he loves her that much.
But some viewers may be put off by the seemingly strange way these sequences are shot. This movie
maintains a kaleidoscopic visual language that encompasses a lot of tones, to account for
multiple universes. This sequence, however, has more of its own style than almost any other — it
is uniquely melodramatic. As some cinephiles will notice, it specifically calls to mind the work of
Wong Kar-wai, particularly the films "In The Mood For Love" and its quasi-sequel, "2046."
The biggest reveal of "Everything Everywhere All at Once" comes relatively early on,
but the full scope of its implications take a while to unpack. At first, all we know about
the existential threat that is Jobu Tupaki is that they were once someone who hopped between
universes like others from the Alpha world, and that keeping too many alternate realities together
in one mind caused them to crack. Soon after, we learn that Jobu is Joy, Evelyn's daughter.
In the Alpha world, Evelyn, the first person to discover the multiverse's existence,
pushed her daughter harder and harder. Eventually,
she lost herself and became a profoundly powerful agent of chaos and destruction.
"Don't. Worry. Evelyn. It's… ORGANIC!"
Our Evelyn's initial forays into 'verse-hopping prove difficult, because all she sees are better
versions of herself and her life. But what Joy experiences is more harrowing. She can
see that in every world, no matter what dynamic forms between her and her mother,
there is still suffering and confusion. She exists in infinite worlds, and all of them stink.
Initially, it seems like Joy is obsessed with finding and killing every Evelyn as revenge,
but really, she wants to find one who will understand her and see
existence for what it is, so she doesn't have to struggle alone.
Jobu's godlike abilities showcase some of the film's most fascinating and visually arresting
ideas, but the real magic is in the emotional underpinning of her arc. The over-the-top
villain origin of Joy being pushed too hard by her scientist mother is suitable for the genre,
but every infraction from every Evelyn onto every Joy is portrayed as equally cataclysmic.
Our Evelyn's key betrayal — hiding Joy's sexuality from Evelyn's father — proves to
be just as traumatic and harmful as another Evelyn experimenting on her daughter until she became a
kind of anti-deity. This is the key to the film's exploration of existence and generational trauma.