Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Daniels' breakthrough is that their multiverse is a metaphor with a working engine, not a franchise device. Every universe jump — hotdog fingers, rock universe, opera singer, cook-with-a-raccoon — is a specific argument about a life Evelyn could have had. The film uses its own absurdity as emotional accounting.

The screenplay is structured as an action-comedy on the surface and a mother-daughter drama underneath, and the two modes reinforce each other constantly. The absurdity earns the tears; the tears justify the absurdity.

Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn's exhaustion as its own form of physical performance. Her martial-arts sequences are vintage Yeoh, but the taxi-office scenes are the ones that win her the Oscar.

Ke Huy Quan's return to acting, 38 years after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is one of the great comeback narratives in film history — and the performance earns it. Stephanie Hsu's Joy / Jobu Tupaki is a full double performance, sliding between teenage vulnerability and cosmic nihilism without losing either.

The Daniels, editor Paul Rogers, and a small practical-effects team built a maximalist film for roughly one-tenth the budget of a studio tentpole. The seams show occasionally and that is part of the charm — the film argues that invention and urgency matter more than polish.

Son Lux's score is the year's most ambitious, and the film's willingness to end on a quiet laundromat conversation rather than a third-act spectacle is the bravest narrative choice of 2022.

Pros: Michelle Yeoh's career performance; a multiverse conceit that earns its emotional payoff; the most formally ambitious indie film of its decade.

Cons: The maximalist first act is overwhelming by design; some action gags (hotdog hands) will lose a subset of viewers before the film cashes its emotional checks; the 139-minute length is felt.