Michelle Yeoh Anchors a Multiverse That Doubles as a Family Story

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert wrote and directed Everything Everywhere All at Once, a 2022 independent film that runs 140 minutes and refuses to sit in one genre. It is action, adventure and science fiction at once, with martial arts, surreal comedy and an immigrant story folded in. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a laundromat in Simi Valley, California with her husband Waymond. The tagline promises the universe is bigger than you realize. The film spends 140 minutes proving it.

Trailer, via A24.

Evelyn Wang and the IRS Audit

Evelyn is middle-aged, overwhelmed and failing. The laundromat is failing. An IRS audit is coming. Waymond is trying to serve her divorce papers to force a conversation about their marriage. Her father Gong Gong, Cantonese for grandfather, is irritable and demanding. Her daughter Joy is battling depression and has a girlfriend, Becky, whom Evelyn is reluctant to accept.

At a tense meeting with IRS Revenue Agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre, Waymond’s body is taken over by Alpha-Waymond, a version of her husband from the Alphaverse. He explains that every life choice creates a new universe. The deceased Alpha-Evelyn built verse-jumping technology, which lets people access the skills, memories and bodies of their parallel selves by performing bizarre, statistically unlikely actions.

The threat is Jobu Tupaki, the Alpha-Joy whose mind splintered after Alpha-Evelyn pushed her to verse-jump beyond her endurance. Jobu experiences all universes at once and can manipulate reality at will. She has built the Everything Bagel, a toroid singularity that could destroy the multiverse.

Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and the Cast

Yeoh carries the film as Evelyn and several other versions of her. The role was written for Jackie Chan until Kwan and Scheinert reconceived the protagonist as a woman, feeling it would make the husband-wife dynamic more relatable. The character was briefly named Michelle Wang, after Yeoh. She pushed back.

“Evelyn deserves her own story to be told,” Yeoh said. “This is a very ordinary mother [and] housewife who is trying her best to be a good mother to her daughter, a good daughter to her father, a wife that’s trying to keep the family together.”

Ke Huy Quan plays Waymond, meek and lighthearted, whose altruistic outlook runs contrary to Joy’s nihilism. Stephanie Hsu plays Joy and Jobu Tupaki. James Hong plays Gong Gong. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Deirdre.

Son Lux and the Soundtrack

The score comes from Son Lux, with collaborations from Mitski, David Byrne, André 3000, John Hampson and Randy Newman. Newman, who has scored nine Disney-Pixar films, voices Raccacoonie, a nod to Ratatouille. Kwan and Scheinert drew on Wong Kar-wai, the children’s book Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the video game Everything, and philosopher Mary-Jane Rubenstein. The film works through existentialism, nihilism, surrealism and absurdism, and through neurodivergence, depression, generational trauma and Asian American identity.

What the Film Actually Does

The verse-jumping gimmick could have been noise. It is not. Kwan and Scheinert use it to make Evelyn look at the lives she could have led, which is the only way the film can make her look at the life she has. The Everything Bagel is the strongest idea here: a nihilist’s weapon that is also a depressed daughter’s cry, and the film never separates the two.

The weakest stretch is the middle, where the action piles up faster than the meaning does. The film earns its 140 minutes back in the final act, when Waymond’s altruism gets its answer. The best performance is Quan’s — quiet, unglamorous, and the film’s actual argument.

A24 · Daniel Kwan · Daniel Scheinert · Everything Everywhere All at Once · Ke Huy Quan · Michelle Yeoh