There’s a reason Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated awards season, including yesterday’s Oscars, where it won seven awards out of its 11 nominations. Since its initial muted premiere at SXSW, it has gathered more and more steam through word of mouth almost entirely, leading to it being the most awarded film of all time, far surpassing the previous record-holder, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
This word of mouth is not just casual recommendations, but enthusiastic, loud, public declarations of genius. The movie had such an impact on audiences that it became a viral sensation, with people writing, talking, and tweeting about it constantly, reflecting on the emotional effect it had on them and what it made them think about in their own lives.
Everything Everywhere is not a typical Oscar winner, though what is typical has been slowly changing over time. What the film industry calls Oscar bait, a movie made specifically to get awards, is an overly sentimental film that broaches social issues in a relatively safe way that doesn’t interrogate the systems that cause them too deeply, and is released just in advance of Oscar season to take advantage of recency bias - The Son and Emancipation were two unsuccessful attempts this year as the Academy changed things up.
In contrast, Everything Everywhere is, reductively put, a sci-fi absurdist-comedy, one that jumps through multiverses, with an Asian cast, telling an Asian-American immigrant story about nihilism, existentialism, and the power of love to cut through intergenerational trauma. There are scenes where the only characters are rocks, fight scenes with dildos, people with hot dogs for fingers, and a lot of talking about taxes. People explode into confetti, a giant bagel is a black hole, and there are googly eyes stuck on everything, including Michelle Yeoh’s head.
It may not have been Oscar bait, but it was very much bait for me. I found my curiosity piqued last year when I saw a tweet of a group of Asian-American teenagers collapsed outside a cinema where they’d just watched Everything Everywhere – I thought it was just a funny post, but after watching it, I had a similar reaction. I’d cried so hard into my mask during the showing that I had to get a new one after, as did the person I watched it with. I went home and lay down for several hours after, sobbing intermittently. Even now, months after my first and only watch, I find myself tearing up reflexively while watching clips of the film online, as well as every time I see a video of the cast and crew winning an award.
Not everybody feels as strongly about this film as I do – it didn’t resonate with many critics, who find it grating that people have not shut up about this film for an entire year. For these people, the Oscars had real ‘big day for annoying people’ vibes. Even I, an avowed Everything Everywhere defender, was shocked that so many great films left the Oscars unrecognised because of the hold that this film has on people, but I can’t say it’s undeserved.
Why did I feel so strongly about this film when others didn’t? Everything Everywhere All at Once confronts mental illness, queerness, Asian diaspora, nihilism and existentialism. As a queer Chinese person, it’s difficult not to see my own family in the place of Joy’s, so there was some level of projection, some desire to imagine my own mother telling me she would always choose me. This is a desire that resonates with Asian people in my demographic, which is why I know so many people who left their viewings in absolute shambles.
There is an essential quality to this film that you cannot understand if you lack the cultural understanding of what it means to grow up Asian in an increasingly Westernised world. There were things that flew over Western audience’s heads, like Evelyn calling her daughter fat instead of saying she loved her, the bastardisation of Ratatouille into Raccacoonie, and the scene where Joy tries to leave the laundromat and Evelyn stops her by setting into a monologue that details everything wrong with her daughter.
There are ways in which Evelyn acts that seem callous to a Western audience, and that’s where the racial divide lies, and a generational divide has sprung. With more exposure to Western culture, younger Asian people have begun to understand that there are other ways to show love, but our parents haven’t quite grasped that yet. Joy is distraught at what she sees as rejection, while Evelyn doesn’t know how else to tell her she loves her. It’s not right, but it’s true to life. Where Western audiences might see a lack of kindness and affection, Asian people see a mother struggling to bridge a gap created by years of tradition.
But that doesn’t mean that the film limits itself to an Asian audience – otherwise, it wouldn’t have gotten the recognition it has. Its themes of existentialism altered my brain chemistry, propelling me from seemingly endless nihilism into hopefulness. Even now, when I talk about how to fight off feelings of despair, I talk about the movie’s bagel and googly eyes, and how even though nothing really matters, there is still joy to be found. I think often about Waymond’s radical kindness and optimism, and how it was parental love that saved Joy from her depression. These themes are universal, and they are so powerful in a social climate plagued with despair at politics, climate change, violence, and war. In a world where we witness cruelty every day, movies like this one are all the more important.
If you didn’t like Everything Everywhere All at Once, don’t worry – it just means the film wasn’t for you. Not every film resonates with every audience member, after all. But the film was for me, and people like me, who saw themselves and their lives reflected on the screen. It was for queer people, and Asian people, and people with ADHD, and people who believe nothing matters, and people who believe that if nothing matters, we can liberate ourselves from our self-imposed constraints. Maybe you don’t believe that, and you wish people would just shut up about Everything Everywhere, but I don’t think people will stop talking about this movie for a long, long time. I certainly won’t.