Review: 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' is a dazzling trip through one woman's multiverse, full of invention and heart

The dazzlingly discombobulating “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is so moving, so funny, so emotional, so inventive, so crazy, so all-encompassing in its strangeness and heart that verbal descriptions are insufficient. You’re going to have to take this critic’s word for it: Go see this movie, preferably on a big screen, and then we can compare notes about what the coolest parts were.

It starts with Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeah), a Chinese-American laundromat owner whose business is in trouble. Evelyn has a ton of receipts spread out on her dining table, trying to prepare for a meeting with a frumpy IRS caseworker, Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis). With her dithering husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and her doddering father (James Hong) along for moral support, Evelyn is given the bad news that her receipts are a mess, and Deirdre is contemplating tax-fraud charges.

Then something happens, and Evelyn is dragged into a nearby storage closet with such force it seems to split her reality. She’s dragged there by Waymond — except he explains he’s not Evelyn’s husband. He’s a Waymond from a parallel universe, and has inhabited this universe’s Waymond to get a message to Evelyn. The universes are being overrun by an evil force called Jobu Tupaki, and Waymond is scouring the multiverse to find the one Evelyn who can fight it.

Evelyn gets a glimpse of her other lives in the multiverse. In one, she’s a teppanyaki chef in a Benihana-style restaurant. In another, she’s a Chinese opera singer. In yet another, everyone has evolved hot dogs for fingers. And in each one, Jobu Tupaki is wreaking havoc.

When Evelyn eventually meets Jobu Tupaki, she looks an awful lot like Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Jobu’s growing menace seems to be in proportion to Joy’s exasperation at her mother — for everything from commenting on Joy’s weight to being reluctant to accept Joy’s girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), into the family.

The directing-writing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as Daniels, follow up on their feature debut — “Swiss Army Man,” the infamous Sundance title that featured Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse — with something that redefines the proper level of weirdness in a movie. Believe me, the description so far barely scratches the surface of what happens in this genre-twisting, timeline-bending, reality-warping story.

Not surprisingly, Michelle Yeoh is brilliant as all the many Evelyns this movie requires her to be. She shows the ferocity of her Hong Kong action career, the tenderness of a frazzled Everywoman, the grace of a movie star, and every other emotion that crops up.

The surprise is Quan, who must play an uncountable number of Waymonds and brings a hero’s demeanor to all of them — while delivering some kung-fu moves reminiscent of Jackie Chan in his prime. Quan has experience as a stunt coordinator and choreographer for martial arts movies, after his years as a child actor. Yes, the kid who played Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is 50 years old now, and delivers the most demanding, most poignant movie performance in a generation.

For all I’ve said, and I feel like I’ve given away too much, I’ve barely begun to describe the insanely creative imagery that fills this movie — including a moment so funny and inventive that I still can’t believe I saw it. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” serves up exactly what the title promises, and then some.

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‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’

★★★★

Opens Friday, April 8, in Utah theaters. Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language. Running time: 139 minutes; in English and Mandarin with subtitles.