Entertainment company A24 produced “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a movie with humor, stunning visuals and unexpected sentimentality directed and written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” focuses on a Chinese family and their tax problems, but shifts when the mother, Evelyn, played by Michelle Yeoh, is swept up in an insane, mind-bending multiverse to save the world.
I swear the multiverse themes made me levitate during the movie.
Before the movie was released on Friday in U.S. theaters, it became the highest-rated feature film of all time on Letterboxd.
Letterboxd is a social platform with more than 3 million users who share their film tastes and track movies they’ve watched, according to its website.
As of April 11, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was No. 1 on Letterboxd’s top 250 movies based on the average weighted rating of all Letterboxd users not including stand-up specials, stage plays, concert films, documentaries, shorts and rarities.
It’s inconceivable that anyone could possibly come up with anything this absurd and stylish, but also cathartic.
Writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert published a letter to movie lovers on the A24 website and said movies can change lives through the “cynical parts of our hardened hearts”.
“We realized if we were going to make a film and ask an audience to give us that precious time, the only responsible thing to do in return was to blow their minds and change their lives forever,” Kwan and Scheinert stated in the letter.
There were so many life-changing one-liners in the movie that were far from cheesy. It’s hard to make people question their life decisions without sounding like a poster with a cat on it in a therapists’ office but they made it work.
From a hotdog finger universe to a world where they’re just rocks in a desert, this film has something for everyone.
I went into the movie not knowing what to expect. I watched the trailer and thought I’d be confused and just end up watching for the visuals, but I was wrong.
I sat in my seat giggling at one-liners and cartoon-style fighting while wondering if this everyday mom could find her way through the multiverse.
Although the multiverse was a little difficult to follow, as most multiverse storylines are, it was easy to keep track of the original universe as the movie went on.
Everything matters in a movie; nothing is just there by happenstance and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” proves that every detail matters.
Rating this movie was an easy five stars for me. It took me for a ride, and like Kwan and Scheinert said in their A24 Letterboxd letter, it definitely changed the way I view my life.
In the last thirty minutes, I found myself tearing up. I started to feel the tears on my face by the time the last emotional mother-daughter talk came around and heard one of my roommates sniffle and saw the other curl into a ball.
Yes, I was crying, but I found myself choking out a laugh as tears ran down my cheeks.
It was funny enough to make me chuckle but not enough to take me out of the emotional turmoil in which I found myself. It also wasn’t distracting from the story and that’s what I loved about the ending.
Viewers can walk away and think about the movie’s multiple themes including breaking the generational cycle that may cause a rift between parents and children, or how nothing in the world actually makes sense so it’s important to cherish the parts that do.
I came out thinking about my non-existent lover, my childhood, my mother, my career and all the ways my life could change if I choose one path over the other.
The film explores how a person can be caught between so many expectations and interpretations in life that require so much of one’s attention but despite the hurdles, darkness, and deprivation hope is still possible.
By the end, I not only wanted but needed a hug and for someone to wipe my tears with their hotdog fingers.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is now playing exclusively in theaters.
