EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE - REVIEW

Multiverse films certainly seem to be in fashion at the moment. Marvel have jumped headfirst into it in a number of their MCU properties, and we also have two Across the Spiderverse in development. Even outside of film, last year saw the release of Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart which also explored this idea.

Everything Everywhere All at Once sees Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, directors of 2016’s weirdly wonderful Swiss Army Man) offer their take on the Multiverse, and in the process prove that you don’t need a huge budget, bankable names in the directors chair(s), or a multi billion dollar franchise behind you, to deliver.

Due to the close proximity of their release dates it will be difficult not to compare Everything Everywhere All at Once to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Both contain explorations of the multiverse, both see our characters travel to bizarre worlds, and both have strongly choreographed fight sequences.

Doctor Strange 2, however, cost $175,000,000 more to make. And when you look at the two budgets side by side it feels difficult to justify the difference. Everything Everywhere All at Once is funnier, sillier, sweeter, deeper and madder than Multiverse of Madness. Granted, there are less special effects in the fight scenes, which will have impacted the budgets, but honestly, the fight scenes here felt weightier, more brutal, and certainly more unpredictable than its Marvel counterpart. The outcomes never felt like a foregone conclusion, and therefore it engages you on a far deeper level.

But where Everything Everywhere All at Once really succeeds, is that it has a clear vision of what it wants to be. It manages to straddle genres, often flicking between them seamlessly. Changes in tone felt completely natural, as they should in a film where you a jumping between worlds and realities. We have quick changes in costumes, aspect ratios, colour palettes and more, but instead of being jarring, and pulling you out of the film, they pulled you deeper into it, never wanting to take you eye off proceedings for a second.

The costume design deserves special mention here, Shirley Kurata does a fantastic job with the whole cast - Michelle Yeoh’s film premiere outfits a particular highlight - but the work she does with Stephanie Hsu is worthy of an Oscar all on it’s own, and tops off a movie which is already a visual delight

The whole cast are superb, each of them being tasked with playing distinct and different versions of themselves, often within the same scene, but Michelle Yeoh steals the show as Evelyn. She is believable as the Evelyn we meet at the start of the film, a character who is so average, who has achieved so little, it makes her means she might just be the Evelyn who can save the world. She plays this Evelyn stoically, just keeping the raw emotion she feels just below the surface. Portraying to the world a version of herself that she believes they want, rather than necessarily who she is.

As we progress through the film and meet the different versions of her, Yeoh manages to embody them all completely. Even those we only meet for a moment, are believable as real people in their own worlds

Everything Everywhere All at Once manages to be laugh out loud funny, heart breakingingly touching, and thrilling. It will feature in almost every top ten list you read at the end of the year (including, I am almost convinced, mine).

If you only see one multiverse film this year - make it this one.