In the Flesh: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (Patreon)

The shards of branching universes tinkle and grind against one another. A fearsomely literal “everything” bagel pulsates like a dark heart at the center of creation. Across the multiverse stretches a chain of families broken by the repeated strikes of apathy, overbearingness, and lack of communication against their weakest joints, and these families are all one family: the stressed, bickering, and exhausted Wangs. Directed by Daniels Kwan and Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once mixes a little of The One into a little Sense8 to create a fun and energetic martial arts comedy anchored by Michelle Yeoh as wounded, abrasive family matriarch Evelyn and Stephanie Hsu as her depressive lesbian daughter, Joy. Rounding out the ensemble are Evelyn’s goofy, gentle husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), long-suffering IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jaime Lee Curtis) and Evelyn’s demanding and unpleasant father Gong Gong (the legendary James Hong), all of them putting in strong, compelling performances. It’s a charming movie, fast-paced and light on its feet, bolstered by inventive costuming and special effects, and unafraid to let its protagonist be a difficult middle-aged woman as complicit in her life’s problems as anyone else around her. I did not much care for it.

That the film’s premise interacts with its stakes and narrative arc in a porous, unclear way is par for the course and fine with me — I don’t enjoy hard sci-fi and I’m perfectly willing, as any regular Rocky Horror Picture Show attendee could tell, to accept the rationale of “otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.” The problem is that the Daniels’ movie follows one person — one and a half, charitably — going on an emotional journey, then acts as though its entire core cast has also done so. It’s a fine ending, for a comedy. Loose ends tied up. Conflicts resolved or headed for resolution. It’s not too sickly-sweet, tinged as it is with continued tax problems and Evelyn’s rudeness, but it is a puzzling situation. Why does the cruel, judgmental Gong Gong of Evelyn’s early life and the film’s first act suddenly seem on the brink of finding room in his heart for his lesbian granddaughter? Why does the timeline nebulously erase just enough of the conflict between Evelyn and Deirdre that they find common ground? What mattered and what didn’t?

Had Everything Everywhere All at Once rolled into its final act with the madcap energy that animates (sometimes literally) its action scenes and its shopworn but serviceable philosophical dialogues — a rather rote exchange between Evelyn and Joy is transformed into something truly delightful by the decision to depict mother and daughter as rocks on a barren, lifeless world — it might have become something truly special. When it’s dealing with rocks with googly eyes or an absurdist branching universe in which humans all have hotdogs for fingers and Evelyn and Deirdre are lovers, the Daniels’ film hits its emotional marks with enough speed and force that you don’t notice they don’t make a lot of sense. Once the engine revs down you’re left with the realization that only Evelyn has really undergone any kind of character development, and that of the core cast otherwise we only really know anything about Deirdre. Close it out with a “loving” fat joke and the whole fireworks show ends with a fart and a puff of smoke.