Everything Everywhere All at Once

Evelyn Wang runs a struggling laundromat with her gentle, endlessly patient husband Waymond, who has just decided — quietly, almost apologetically — to file for divorce, though he can never quite find the moment to tell her. Evelyn is too busy: her ageing father, Gong Gong, has arrived from China expecting to see a successful daughter and a respectable family; her own daughter Joy is trying, again, to introduce her girlfriend Becky properly; and above it all hangs a summons from the tax office. Tonight, the family has an audit.

In the lift on the way up to face the auditor, Waymond suddenly changes: his eyes widen, his voice steadies, and a version of him from another universe takes over his body just long enough to tell Evelyn something impossible. There are infinite parallel universes, one for every choice she never made — and she, this exhausted, disappointing, laundromat-owning Evelyn, is the only version capable of stopping a catastrophe unravelling across all of them.

To fight, she must "verse-jump": performing strange, statistically near-impossible actions to borrow the skills and memories of other Evelyns — a movie star, a kung-fu master, a chef. Something, or someone, is destroying the agents sent to protect the multiverse, and it is heading straight for her audit.

The enemy has a name, Jobu Tupaki, and a shocking identity: she is Joy, Evelyn's own daughter, from a universe where an experiment pushed her across so many lives, so fast, that her sense of a single self shattered. Having lived every possible experience at once, Jobu has arrived at a conclusion that feels, to her, like simple mathematics: if you have done everything, nothing can matter, and nothing is worth wanting.

To prove it, she has built something monstrous out of the most mundane object imaginable — an everything bagel, piled with every topping, every regret, every possibility, folded in on itself until it becomes a black hole that can swallow all existence. Alpha-verse agents want Evelyn to hunt Jobu down and stop her before she steps into it and takes everything with her.

The fight spills across universes both ridiculous and dazzling — a world where fingers are hot dogs, a world where humans never evolved beyond googly-eyed rocks, a world where Evelyn became the film star she once dreamed of being, with a devoted, elegant Waymond at her side. In each one, chaos and comedy sit beside something achingly sad: a mother chasing a daughter she has never really seen.

In one quiet, near-wordless universe, Evelyn and Joy exist only as two rocks side by side on a hillside, their thoughts appearing only as subtitles. Stripped of chaos and bodies, Evelyn feels, for a moment, the pull of her daughter's nihilism: perhaps nothing does matter, and the easiest thing would be to stop trying.

But Evelyn chooses otherwise. Facing enemies across a dozen universes — the tax auditor, cruel alternate selves, and finally Jobu herself — she stops fighting and starts being kind instead, echoing something Waymond told her at the very start: that in a universe of chaos, being kind, especially when you don't have to be, might be the only thing that makes any sense.

She finds Jobu, and instead of a weapon, she offers acceptance — of Joy, of Becky, of a daughter she never fully saw. It doesn't erase the multiverse's chaos or fix the family instantly, but it is enough. The film ends back where it started: in the same small, mundane laundromat, the same unresolved tax bill on the counter — except that everything between them now feels, quietly, different.

Jobu Tupaki's despair dramatizes a real philosophical position: nihilism, the view that life has no inherent meaning, value or purpose. The film sets nihilism against a different, more hopeful tradition: absurdism, most closely associated with the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus argued that the universe truly is indifferent and meaningless — but that giving up, or pretending otherwise, are both mistakes. Instead, he said, we should recognise the absence of meaning and choose, anyway, to act, to care, and to find our own reasons to keep going.

Evelyn's answer — meeting her daughter's void with deliberate kindness rather than violence or despair — is a fairly precise dramatization of Camus's "revolt": not solving meaninglessness, but responding to it with a chosen act of love. The film doesn't claim the universe has a purpose. It claims that you get to choose what matters to you inside it, even if — especially if — nothing was ever guaranteed to matter at all.

Beneath the multiverse, the film tells an ordinary, true-to-life story: a Chinese immigrant family running a small, exhausting business, caught between a homeland's expectations and a new country's demands, an ageing parent's disapproval, a marriage worn thin by decades of grinding work, and a daughter whose identity her mother struggles fully to accept. Directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (credited together as "the Daniels") built the multiverse chaos around this very grounded, very common story of generational and cultural strain.

The film's impact was historic, and entirely real: at the 2023 Academy Awards, Everything Everywhere All at Once won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress; Ke Huy Quan (who plays Waymond) won Best Supporting Actor decades after leaving acting behind; and Jamie Lee Curtis won Best Supporting Actress. The laundromat and the audit are invented; the ache of an immigrant family trying to hold itself together is not.