Everything Everywhere All at Once Review

The Daniels' trick is that all the maximalism is emotional bookkeeping: every absurd universe is a road not taken, so the hot dog fingers and the silent rock canyon and the kung fu superstar are all measuring the same regret. Michelle Yeoh has to play a dozen registers, often inside a single cut, and the film works because she keeps the exhausted laundromat owner legible underneath every one of them. Ke Huy Quan's Waymond gets the best speech, arguing for kindness as a strategy rather than a weakness, and Jamie Lee Curtis commits utterly to an unflattering, brilliantly physical auditor.

The fight choreography, staged on a shoestring inside an office building, is more inventive than most budgets can buy. Against that, the middle hour is genuinely exhausting: verse-jumping rules get restated repeatedly, the joke density outruns the emotional line, and the photography is functional rather than composed. When it finally lands on two rocks in a desert with subtitles it is unexpectedly perfect. Getting there costs more patience than it should.