EVERYTHING beautiful, hyper kinetic, wildly strange and strikingly imaginative! EVERYWHERE brilliant– story, sound and silliness that blows your mind. I’ve never seen a movie like it. The less sense it makes the better it is ALL AT ONCE.
Evelyn is hanging on by a thread as she manages her family’s laundromat while mismanaging their taxes. The threat of divorce and seizure of the family business by the IRS looms, as does her daughter’s desire to come out. Evelyn’s fracturing life will continue to splinter in ways she could never imagine as an alternate version of her husband inhabits her actual husband’s body to reveal the existence of a multiversal threat that plans to destroy her. Only Evelyn can thwart this terror by channeling the skills of her alternate selves connected by branches of their lives to save all their worlds and the existential reckoning of her purpose in her own.
That’s putting it mildly
The Daniels (Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) have composed a cinematic symphony of chaos and thematic resonance with this epic. It’s bold in every sense. They threw everything plus the kitchen sink at every frame. To prescribe a singular aesthetic to this film is a travesty. Like the multiverse it occupies a place in every aesthetic. It’s reminiscent of a classic hero’s journey with a SciFi flare, not unlike what we see Neo experience in “The Matrix”, and an intimate family drama a la “The Farewell”. Michelle Yeoh is a living legend who delivers one of her most powerful and vulnerable performances yet. This is easily one of the best ensembles of the year and an emotional return to the screen for actor Ke Huy Quan fondly remembered as Short Round in “Temple of Doom”. An outstanding score, mesmerizing imagery, and outlandish narrative elements to make this the wildest movie going experience of my life.
