The Academy has grown rather restless of late. For decades, the path to Oscar glory followed a depressingly familiar route: biopics of troubled geniuses, grim dramas featuring protagonists battling terminal illnesses, or prestige pieces steeped in enough suffering to make the audience feel virtuous simply for enduring them. Comedies might occasionally snag a nomination, but rarely the top prize, and science fiction remained firmly in the ghetto of technical awards—flashy but somehow beneath serious consideration. Yet something has shifted. The voters have begun straying from their well-worn formula, and in this new landscape, a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once could not merely hope for recognition but actually sweep the board. This 2022 science fiction action comedy, penned and directed by Daniel M. Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—the filmmaking duo known collectively as "the Daniels"—stands as perhaps the most striking evidence that the Academy's tastes have genuinely evolved, for better or worse.
The film unfolds in the unglamorous setting of Simi Valley, California, where we meet Evelyn Quan Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh. She is a middle-aged Chinese immigrant running a failing laundromat alongside her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), a man whose optimism has begun to grate on her nerves after years of financial struggle. Evelyn finds herself squeezed between two generations and two worldviews: her elderly father Gong Gong (James Hong), a traditionalist who judges her every decision, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), a lesbian with a white girlfriend named Becky (Tallie Medel) whom Evelyn cannot quite accept. It is hardly the stuff of blockbuster entertainment—an unhappy woman facing divorce papers from Waymond and an aggressive audit by IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), whose bureaucratic hostility seems almost personal.
Then the floor drops out. While trapped in the IRS offices, Evelyn experiences something impossible: her consciousness splinters, her husband transforms into a different man entirely, and she finds herself yanked across dimensions. This alternative Waymond—Alpha-Waymond, as he calls himself—hails from a parallel universe where his Evelyn developed technology allowing consciousness to hop between realities. He warns her of an apocalyptic threat: Jobu Tupaki, a trans-universe entity with genocidal intentions and reality-warping powers. The revelation that Jobu is actually an alternate version of Joy, pushed to nihilistic madness by her mother's impossible expectations, gives the film's chaos an unexpectedly painful emotional anchor.
The Daniels began exploring multiverse concepts back in the early 2010s, with actual scripting commencing in 2016. By the time their film reached cinemas, audiences had already encountered parallel universe storytelling in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which meant the Daniels faced genuine pressure to distinguish their vision. They succeeded largely by grounding their cosmic absurdity in the mundane. Where Spider-Verse embraced comic book aesthetics, Everything Everywhere opens like a classic Oscar-baiting immigrant drama—think The Joy Luck Club by way of kitchen-sink realism—before detonating into surrealism. Evelyn encounters versions of herself as a haute cuisine chef, a martial arts film star, woman in a world where people have elongated sausages instead of fingers, a puppet, and, most memorably, a rock. The action sequences come fast and relentless, punctuated by violence that occasionally veers into the genuinely bizarre, including a notorious scene involving unorthodox deployment of a sex toy that required digital modesty patches to satisfy the MPA censors.
Delayed two years by COVID-19, the film nevertheless found substantial box office success, though its critical reception proved more consequential. Reviewers championed it enthusiastically, creating momentum that carried through to Oscar night and seven statuettes: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. The acting prizes, at least, seem defensible. The casting itself carried symbolic weight, with producers skilfully framing the film as Hollywood atonement for decades of marginalising Asian performers. Michelle Yeoh, the Malaysian Chinese actress whose career peaked in 1990s action cinema before stalling in Western markets, found in Evelyn a role demanding enough to transcend her earlier "action heroine" pigeonholing. She modulates between exhaustion, bewilderment, and ferocity with genuine mastery.
Yet the film's most resonant narrative belonged to Ke Huy Quan. The Vietnamese American actor had seemingly vanished after childhood roles as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies. Following a nineteen-year acting hiatus spent working behind the camera, his return as Waymond—simultaneously pathetic and heroic, ridiculous and profound—provided the evening's most genuinely moving Oscar moment. Stephanie Hsu completed the sweep, her portrayal of Joy/Jobu Tupaki earning recognition that doubled as progress for queer representation, though her performance would have merited acclaim regardless of identity politics.
Still, performances this committed cannot entirely disguise the film's structural problems. For all its inventiveness, Everything Everywhere All at Once suffers from pacing that can only be described as exhausting. At nearly two and a half hours, the relentless barrage of gags, action sequences, and emotional crescendos becomes genuinely taxing. The central conceit—reality-hopping through bizarre alternate selves—grows repetitive well before the final act, and viewers who grasp the emotional trajectory early may find themselves checking their watches while waiting for Evelyn to reach the inevitable conclusions about acceptance and love.
Everything Everywhere All at Once remains a solid, occasionally brilliant piece of filmmaking that deserved its moment of recognition. Yet like so many recent Best Picture winners, it feels more of its time than timeless—the perfect film for 2022, perhaps, but unlikely to join the ranks of unquestionable classics.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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