Everything Everywhere All at Once
directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinart - 7/10
Since the mid-2010s, A24 has defined the contemporary indie film landscape. After finding their footing with the early works of directors like Denis Villeneuve and Noah Baumbach, they catapulted into the mainstream with titles like Room, Moonlight, and Lady Bird. Now, the production studio is a staple of modern movies. Though spanning many genres, the studio’s films have a signature ambiance that draws a dedicated fanbase. Since securing a mainstream status, the studio has produced acclaimed titles each year and is best known for its horror, coming-of-age, and arthouse movies. There is one genre that A24 seems to have a hard time getting ahold of - action movies. But this week, Everything Everywhere All at Once made its way into the spotlight, carving out a name for the studio alongside action giants like Marvel and becoming one of the highest-rated movies of all time.
This movie comes quite close to being the masterpiece that critics claim it to be, but it isn’t entirely there. Its good aspects lie almost entirely in the visual departments: the cinematography, costumes, production design, and editing are all eye-catching and memorable. The lighting design is some of the best I’ve seen, and the editing stands out during intense sequences and becomes unnoticeable during the more mundane scenes. None of the cast members deliver a terrible performance; most are outstanding.
Conceptually, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a masterpiece. Multiverses have recently dominated the sci-fi genre because of our intense fascination with who we could have been given different circumstances. A constant feeling of being surveilled leads humanity to obsess over fictional worlds where we can examine all of our possible successes, failures, and life paths. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinart (better known as Daniels) address this concept with the chaos it deserves: a totally eclectic film that constantly presses down on the accelerator and creates a cosmic array of despair and euphoria, power and weakness, loving and loathing. The concept is fantastic, but a movie doesn’t only exist on paper, and when realized, the film misses the mark.
In a lucky stroke of genius, the intentionally chaotic nature of the movie seems to provide a shield from negative criticisms, giving the film a sort of meta defense mechanism. Tonal inconsistencies, failed jokes, and bad writing can be played off as intentional (a part of the all-encompassing and eccentric energy of the movie). The comedic inconsistencies were perhaps the most frustrating. There were plenty of solid (even great) jokes, but they were eclipsed by dry quips more suited for a cheap Marvel mid-action gag than the high-brow artistic narrative that this movie seems to be reaching for.
Speaking of Marvel - it’s hard to watch the action scenes and see something that isn’t nearly identical to those of a modern superhero movie meshed with classic Kung-Fu sequences. The scenes maintain the quirkiness of A24 to keep the artsier anti-Marvel fans engaged, but most of the sequences read as mainstream fight scenes interspliced with heavy-handed references to artists like Wong Kar Wai and Stanley Kubrick. The scenes are well directed and, for the most part, well edited, but they don’t mesh well with the social and emotional conflicts of the movie. Everything Everywhere All at Once has an intriguing commentary about family, primarily relationships between mother and daughter, but these themes don’t always sync well with the action plotlines. The emotional core and the intense fight scenes seem to compete for our attention rather than working together to create a well-rounded movie.
In a word, Everything Everywhere All at Once is frustrating. It is so close to being something great, and it is just a few steps away from being an excellent commentary about a culture that is infinitely derivative and obsessively stimulatory. Perhaps I’m missing something, and beneath the maximalist takes on nihilism, there is something slightly more original, but I don’t see it. This film is not terrible by any means, but it failed to resonate with me as the masterpiece some claim it is.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was released on March 11, 2022 and is currently in US theatres.