Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Image: A24 Films
All right, let’s start this essay in a kebab shop at 11pm on a Saturday night. I’m eating hot chips—or, perhaps more accurately, eating a soup made of chilli sauce with the occasional chip floating in it—and raving about Everything Everywhere All At Once. It shows that movies can be weird and popular, I argue. In fact, I think maybe it’s so popular because it’s a deeply weird film. It’s like nothing most of us have ever seen before—and that can only be a good thing for both our minds and for the vibrancy of the film industry.
My friend listens patiently, and so too does the man in a suit sitting at the table behind him, balancing eavesdropping with the second tidiest job of eating a kebab I’ve ever seen. ‘You want a weird film?’ he pipes up as we leave. ‘Try Swiss Army Man!’
Here’s the thing—Everything Everywhere All At Once and Swiss Army Man were both created by the same writing/directing duo, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as Daniels. So, what can we learn from this impromptu kebab shop film club? Well, two things. There are films we consider weird, and there are people who want to watch them.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once follows the story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) who runs a struggling laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). She has a fraught relationship with their 20-something daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and to top everything off, they are being targeted by an IRS inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis). So far, so straightforward, but from there the film (figuratively and literally) fractures. Suddenly it’s a colourful, chaotic spectacle that moves across different possibilities, different universes, different lives. Evelyn learns that she is just one version of herself in an infinite multiverse—and now has to tap into her different selves in order to fight an extremely dangerous—and surprisingly fashion-savvy—villain.
What makes the film so special is that it is neither silly nor preachy. It’s just doing its own thing, pushing against the boundaries of what audiences and critics expect.
This is Daniels’ first film since the release of Swiss Army Man, their 2016 debut, which has subsequently been summarised as the ‘Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie’. And sure, central character Manny (Radcliffe) is indeed a flatulent corpse—but beneath the surface layer of shocks and jokes there were deeper themes of loneliness, of shame, of unhappiness with the world. It was fun, it was weird, and it was original. When I interviewed the directors upon the film’s release, they spoke about subverting taboos, of digging out beauty in places where it is not traditionally found.
Everything Everywhere All At Once uses a similar scaffolding. It’s easy to distil the film down to its most unusual and striking images and scenes (it’s been described as ‘like The Matrix with butt plugs’) but the core of the film is again probing deeper human issues. The feeling of not living up to your potential. The seductive path of ‘what if?’ The unique struggles that come from being a migrant family. The chasms that can exist between children and parents. What makes the film so special, though—and Daniels so remarkable—is that the result is neither silly nor preachy. It’s just doing its own thing, pushing against the boundaries of what audiences and critics expect, while still being a hugely engaging Hollywood film with something to say. Somehow, a storyline about a world where everyone has sausages for fingers turns into a tender love story. Scenes simply featuring two rocks on a clifftop pack the biggest emotional punches of the film. Each element of Everything Everywhere All At Once is enough to make the film worthwhile—but the end product is greater than the sum of its parts.
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What makes a film ‘weird’? At first this seems like a pretty clear-cut question. A ‘weird’ film challenges expectations; perhaps it breaks taboos, or doesn’t follow a familiar pattern, or looks different to what we’re used to. Easy.
The deeper you dig, however, the more complicated it gets. Take a mainstream film from overseas, dub it into English, and put it into an Australian cinema. If it’s different from what audiences are used to—as I learned first-hand at school when recounting the plots of some of my favourite Hong Kong movies— suddenly, for some people, that’s ‘weird’.
But I don’t want to conflate unusual with weird, even though it’s a murky line. Similarly, I don’t want to blur the boundary between arthouse and weird. Arthouse films, to give an imperfect but brief summary, prioritise the art of a film over popularity. They’re okay with being for a niche audience. But that doesn’t mean that all arthouse films are weird or vice versa, as tempting it is to just shove all ‘weird’ films under that umbrella. See how complicated it’s getting? I was halfway down a brain spiral on the cusp of getting out the clipboard and red string as I tried to figure it out. So, to help, I assembled an expert panel (read: met up with some friends with whom I used to work in a cinema) and our conclusion was that the definition of a ‘weird’ film is hard to nail down, but it’s one that’s difficult to categorise, and you know it when you see it. Holy Motors: weird. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: not weird. Bend it Like Beckham: jury’s still out (I think it was weird at the time but no longer is).
Everything Everywhere All At Once, which features a fight scene centred around a bumbag and a whole bunch of multiverses: definitely weird. Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which features a fight scene centred around musical notes and also a whole bunch of multiverses: not weird.
Wait, what?
The two films do take on similar territory, but the difference is that one is wilder, more free, untested, while the other—still perfectly good and enjoyable—exists within a franchise, a scaffolding of a bigger, more rigid structure. Superhero movies have money to burn, built in audiences, and impressive marketing teams to help get the word out. The individual films have boxes to tick, formulas to follow, and in the space left over, that’s where creativity is allowed to come through.
They’ll bring in a director known for their distinct voice and skill—Taika Waititi, Chloé Zhao, Sam Raimi—to inject a bit of difference and personality into a film which, whether or not it reaches the box office heights they aspire to, is still a relatively safe bet compared to an experimental indie screenplay about a yeti who yearns to join the Boston Philharmonic (no one steal my idea please).
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‘Weird’ is often associated with ‘bad’, and I think that’s just because it means that when something is new or different we don’t have the tools ready to go to help us process it and so we flail around. It’s why, when I’d bring leftover dinner for school lunch instead of the sandwiches all of my classmates were used to, I’d sometimes be laughed at or told my food smelled, well, weird. It’s also why I stared for what was definitely way too long at a woman carefully holding a plastic bag under her dog to catch his poop before it hit the ground. It was something outside of my frame of reference, and my mental index of comparable incidences was completely empty.
What makes a film ‘weird’? At first this seems like a pretty clear-cut question. The deeper you dig, however, the more complicated it gets.
There’s a scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once where Evelyn goes to say something personal and emotional to her daughter, but you watch her eyes flicker as she reconsiders and instead tells Joy she’s getting too fat.
I burst out laughing—and was the only one in the cinema to do so. For the last few years I’ve been in a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits, and, along with conversations with friends, one thing it has underscored to me is that there are a lot of shared experiences—including being criticised for your appearance by family no matter your weight, your haircut, or your clothing choices. I’m not saying it’s okay, far from it, but it is a thing—and something that a lot of people can relate to. It’s such a trope that it was even included in a scene in the recent Pixar film Turning Red, where the protagonist is set upon by a group of Aunties who argue over whether she has lost or gained weight. Including this scene shows Evelyn in a light that is relatable and realistic—and it’s part of her character to offer criticism as a form of affection.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw watched the same conversation in Everything Everywhere All At Once and called it a ‘genuinely shocking scene where Evelyn fat-shames her daughter—an authentically upsetting moment of family dysfunction that seems to come from another film, one in a parallel universe.’ His extremely short review, however reveals that perhaps the bigger issue, for him and many other critics, is one of perspective.
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody also offered a fairly scathing review, citing the ‘emptiness’ of the film, while Bradshaw similarly criticised the ‘hyperactive’ veneer for ‘never letting up for a single second to let us care about, or indeed believe in, any of its characters.’ But for so many, particularly from Asian and migrant families, it was the characters more than the high energy science fiction and imaginative fight scenes that made the movie resonate so strongly.
Evelyn offers criticism as a form of affection. Her dialogue has the character speaking Mandarin to her husband, Cantonese to her father, English to her daughter, and switching seamlessly between the three—often mid-sentence. Everything in the film—yes, even the tangential riff on Ratatouille—comes back to relationships and communication; to the harm we inflict on one another. Look past the raccoons and the butt plugs, and what matters in Everything Everywhere All At Once is family—everything else is just extremely compelling window dressing. Believability depends on where you’re standing—some people just can’t see when there’s a wall in their way.
It’s fine, and completely valid, to dislike a work, no matter how popular—but being able to articulate why is important. Many critics seem to panic when you can’t neatly pin a genre on a film; it means they can’t easily compare it to anything that’s come before. They don’t know what to make of it, and as a result they class it as bad, or as a failure. This state of mind is a problem because then anything groundbreaking or different, anything that spotlights a population that hasn’t traditionally been centred in Hollywood, is not given a fair chance.
Many critics seem to panic when you can’t neatly pin a genre on a film; it means they can’t easily compare it to anything that’s come before.
Hollywood and the box office are not traditionally kind to experimentation and innovation in cinema, which means that while good films do keep coming out, they tend to follow safe formulas.
Take a look at the best picture nominees for any given year: That Year’s Most High-Profile War Film, Some Biopic Starring Actor Who Desperately Craves An Award, Film Celebrating Film, Something Vaguely Topical, Look Who’s Masquerading As Arthouse, History Movie, and Oh Would You Look At These Special Effects.
The result is an industry that is at risk of stagnating, that pumps out high quality versions of the same thing over and over again. Public response to films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, however, suggests that maybe we’re all getting a bit fed up—that we need to allow more creatives to be, well, creative.
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Weird films, of course, aren’t new; there are always plenty of them around. The challenge is finding a way to see them outside the narrow window of a festival or the flicker of a cinema season. And even then, what of the deeply weird films that fall between the already huge cracks? The ones that don’t get made because they are not guaranteed to sell?
I worked at an arthouse cinema and I watched the small, strange films come and go quickly, with only the occasional standout managing to catch word of mouth and thus hang on for a more than a week or two.
Cinema is not as simple as Marvel versus everything else, mass appeal versus art, though it is tempting to pit things against one another in this way. The fact that Everything Everywhere All At Once has captured the attention of so many, that it feels so fresh and joyous and revolutionary, makes a strong case for taking a chance on more weird movies. Films don’t just have to be the third remake of the same comic book within ten years, as fun as they might be—maybe there is room for everyone at the table.
Everything Everywhere All At Once. Image: A24 Films
Everything Everywhere All At Once is in limited cinemas now.
