Everything Everywhere All at Once

Originally published on 17/05/2022 on Letterboxd

The first 20 minutes were promising, and there are occasionally flashes of something meaningful with regards to generational trauma, but every time this approaches something resembling sincerity it undercuts it with such inane humour. This brand of sickeningly saccharine storytelling is particularly perplexing because of how it turns queerness into the butt of most of its inert jokes, and attempts to manoeuvre its way out of confronting it with a mantra like “be kind, even when you don’t know what’s going on”, which wouldn’t look out of place in the Lloyd’s bank advertisement that played before this.

Its central conceit- a resignation to inexplicability- renders its entire narrative arc futile, which isn’t inherently a detriment, but the problem is that it extends into this vapid vortex that becomes painful to watch as it prolongs for an hour more than its banality requires. The Daniels claimed to have learnt about compositions through watching Every Frame a Painting, which is very much evident in how every single one of the convoluted visual gags that upholds its skeletal, decaying narrative resembles a decade-old CollegeHumour skit. Its total absence of any formal inventiveness and reliance on hollow pastiche would imply that its supposed emotional resonance is intended to compensate, but when its emotion is predicated on the basis of some vague notion of universal kindness (isolated from any of its uncomfortable context), what is left? The answer is: Michelle Yeoh trying her hardest to wrestle with a dreadful script.