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Sunday evening, after seeing the latest MCU film that morning, I went and watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) from A24 Studios and ‘The Daniels,’ (Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) another multiverse hopping storyline with a villain threatening all of existence.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn a woman estranged from her very western daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), her very Chinese Father Gong Gong (James Hong), and who ignores her geeky and meek husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan.) With both their laundromat business and marriage failing

A24 Studios

Evelyn and her husband, accompanied by Gong Gong who due to infirmity cannot be left home, are summoned to the local IRS office to confront a cold and unsympathetic auditor Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) but everything is derailed when Waymond from an alternate timeline confronts Evelyn and insists she is the key to saving the universe from Jobu Tupaki, a pan-universal creature bent on chaos and destruction.

EEAO gives its actors a real meal of characters to portray, meek, bold, strong, weak, heroic and depressed most of the cast gets a shot at playing wide and diverse versions of their characters. Despite the on-screen insanity, fun, and sheer inventiveness at its heart the film grapples with extensional dread and the nihilistic fear that nothing at all truly matters. Love, Joy, Happiness, and even life itself is fleeting eventually becoming nothing but dust. The script doesn’t shy away from this truth but also finds ways to recognize that those fleet moments are the value and that because there is no permanence doesn’t mean that there is no meaning.

The film’s characters speak in combination of English and Chinese with liberal use of subtitling for those like me who are stuck as a monolingual talent. While dealing with heavy themes such as the meaning of life and the push and pull of generations and culture EEAO also dips into crude humor and exhilarating action presenting a mixture of tones and styles as diverse as life itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once and I am already looking forward to some future repeat viewing.