There's so much going on in Everything Everywhere All at Once—and it goes on so relentlessly, and for so long—that after a while a kookiness overload begins to weigh it down. Once you've absorbed the wild fanny-pack smackdown, the marauding bagel, and the sight of a monstrous Jamie Lee Curtis tearing down a door, you may be a little too tuckered to maintain excitement for the movie's other oddities—the puppy-flinging, the butt-plugging, the floppy hot-dog-fingered hands. The uproar feels endless.
It is not entirely surprising that this is a picture by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who write and direct together under the name Daniels. Their debut feature, the 2016 Swiss Army Man—the story of a fart-propelled corpse, played by Daniel Radcliffe—was no run-of-the-mill affair either. But Everything is vastly more complex—or complicated, anyway. The motivating notion is that every choice made by every human being creates a "branching universe"—an alternate reality in which every rejected possibility takes root and flourishes, independent of the originating human's existence, which of course continues on.
