What did I just watch?
How do you begin to talk about a film where two grown men try to jump onto an IRS award that is also a huge buttplug (because dealing with the iRS is a pain in the arse) to access other memories from versions of themselves in other dimensions to fight a person who might be able to stop the great evil?
Well, I am going to give it a go. Wish me luck,
Everything Everywhere All at Once (dirs. Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert) is a surrealist’s wet dream. There it is. I nailed it. Review over.
For a more in-depth review, the film follows Evelyn Wang (played by the amazing Michelle Yeoh who smashed this out of the park) who is struggling with her laundromat business being audited by the IRS (see above), her elderly father, Gong Gong (James Hong) coming to visit from overseas, her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and hiding the fact that her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is a lesbian, from her father.
The family unit has to go to the IRS to deal with auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), winner of the above buttplug awards, when Waymond starts to act weird and tells Evelyn that she is one of the last hopes to defeat a force so evil it is destroying the multi-verse.
It feels very Matrix-like: there is another world just beyond what you can see and experience. Also, the fight scenes feel very similar because of the interesting and new ways that they are presented. The first Waymond fight is inventive and fun. Quan still has the same great comedic timing he had as Short Round from Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom and the way he uses a fanny pack- that boy has skills.
Once we are starting down the rabbit hole it doesn’t stop. Most of the $25 million budget must have been spent on costumes and make up for the big baddie. When you are omnipotent and can control matter then why dress and look normal when you can look fabulous?
The surface layer of this film is glitz, glam, amazing costumes, sausages for fingers (yes you read that right), fight scenes that rival anything out in the cinema recently, a ridiculous story, and laughs that had the whole cinema cracking up, but it’s really about the challenges of living our lives with the multitude of options we possibly could have made and living with the decisions we do make. Dealing with cross-generational trauma and how it affects all parts of the family, specifically, who has the strength to carry the weight of those decisions and those traumas.
What did I just watch?
A great movie, and so should you.
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe
13th April 2022