Everything Everywhere All at Once sure lives up to its title. The sci-fi comedy “takes the red-pill mind-screw of The Matrix and multiplies it by infinity,” writes Variety.

The feature stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a lowly laundromat owner who discovers that she can experience endless dimensions simultaneously. In the internal logic of the film, somewhere there is a universe in which anything that could have happened to Evelyn actually did happen. That means there is a timeline where she is living a parallel life as a huge Hong Kong action star, and an opera singer, and a maid, and a teppanyaki-style chef… ad infinitum.

To infinity and beyond

Writers and co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert wanted that sense of infinity — of all of the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, and all of the tiny moving pieces underneath it — to remain top-of-mind for the audience. Even if that meant fraying their minds.



The approach was to throw out the rules of traditional filmmaking and just whatever works then it works,” says editor Paul Rogers. “Dan and Daniel wanted to make a film, and then to break that film, and then we want it to rebuild itself.”

Rogers previously worked with the filmmakers (collectively known as the Daniels) to make the equally absurd Swiss Army Man, which featured Daniel Radcliffe playing a flatulent corpse.

“We wanted people to be overwhelmed and as confused as Evelyn is but not frustrated. More confused and curious. There’s a fine line between overwhelmed, curious and excited and overwhelmed and ‘I can’t take it any more’. We trod that line carefully.”

“They’d been working on Everything Everywhere for 6 or 7 years and although it seems like there was a lot of experimentation – and there was – almost all of it was already in their minds by the time we shot.”



In prep, the Daniels spent an hour and a half acting out the movie scene by scene to Rogers. “There was a big giant whiteboard on the wall with diagrams and sketches of all these universes marked- ‘hotdog finger’ or ‘Alphaverse’ or ‘rock world’. It was all nonsense at the beginning but it slowly became clear that we were telling a very emotional story.”

A world of boundless choice

The script originally centred on a father and his attempt at reconciliation with his teen daughter. With Yeoh on board, the story remains a family drama at heart, which is why it has resonated with audiences, becoming a major hit for indie studio A24 and taking over $50 million worldwide.

If there was a bare bones unengaging story at the centre then the whole project would not work,” says Rogers. “Once we’d established the emotion of a mother struggling to reconnect with her daughter then we could really go to town on all the other flights of fancy.”

These are deliberately overcomplicated metaphors for the generational gaps, communication errors and ideological differences that might happen within any family. Critics say the unhinged imagination on display will leave viewers exhausted, but that could be intentional.

“We wanted people to be overwhelmed and as confused as Evelyn is but not frustrated. More confused and curious. There’s a fine line between overwhelmed, curious and excited and overwhelmed and ‘I can’t take it any more’. We trod that line carefully.”