Everything Everywhere All At Once Movie Review: Michelle Yeoh's Chaotic, Unique Mind-Bending Experience

This film takes the concept that everything is a random rearrangement of particles to form a different reality, described by Jobu Tupaki aka Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu), the so-called antagonist, as a bagel with all the toppings, controlled by her. A verse-jumping adventure, head-lining Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, Everything Everywhere All At Once takes you right out of your comfort zone into multiple universes of varying dimensions and is relentlessly chaotic for most of its runtime.

The juvenile sense of humour may be alleviating for a bit but most of the time you get the feeling that you are being hit from the left field. Weird images take the imagined to a new level here. In one dimension, everyone has hotdogs for fingers; in another, we see police batons turn into floppy dildos; then there are the chefs with raccoons perched under their chef hats. It's another world altogether out here and even the real looks pretty much unreal in all that accumulated chaos. Visceral over-stimulation and shape-shifting are key here.

The story can be mentioned in one sentence. The film is about Evelyn being thrust into a universe-hopping adventure that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about her life, her failures, and her love for her family.

Film inspirations abound in the treatment in Everything Everywhere All At Once - from Ratatouille, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the ghosts of movies past seem to have a bearing on the iconography on display here.

There are aesthetically performed fight sequences, too, choreographed beautifully by Andy and Brian Le. Cinematographer Larkin Seiple and editor Paul Rogers do wonderfully well to contain the eclectic production design and verse folding jumps in a sort of congruous harmony.

The ultimate aim is to posit unconditional love, compassion and understanding to clear out the chaos brought on by judgement and rejection. The directors want us to cherish the moments of love and camaraderie, above all else. And we all know that's not easy.

Yeoh is the heart and soul of the film. Her expressions alone root us to the everyday schizophrenic reality of today's world - which this film is obviously channeling. Yeoh displays great comic timing, superb martial arts skills and human emotion that is deeply experienced. And she has a lot of fun trapped in this chaotic multiverse mayhem - that's very obvious. It's hard to say though, whether the viewer will have as much fun.

This is not a film for the easily disgruntled. You need a resilient mind to watch it.