Everything Everywhere All at Once Is Built Like a Bagel, and Its Center Holds the Film's Answer to Nihilism

Everything Everywhere All at Once is, symbolically and structurally, a bagel. The film written and directed by the Daniels, starring Michelle Yeoh as a woman sucked into a multiversal crisis shaped like a bagel, is organised in six tiers, and the real question is whether there is anything at the center of it.

In 2022 the big multiverse event was supposed to be Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a movie I liked, but looking back I think most would agree this is the film that gives its multiverse a pulse. The directors have said they just wanted to make a kung fu love letter to The Matrix, and they teamed up with the directors of Avengers: Endgame to do it. So is this a Marvel audition piece with nothing new to say about nihilism, or a deeply personal story about regret? Since Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are such pros at practical workarounds, this seemingly complex film is actually self contained in six settings: the Wang family home, the laundromat wrapped around it, the IRS building around that, the alternate life paths of the multiverse, Jobu Tupaki's everything bagel absorbing all of it, and finally the mysterious void at the core.

The opening mirror shows a happiness the film never gives Evelyn

We open on Evelyn, Waymond and Joy singing karaoke in a circular mirror, with the karaoke machine glowing on the left and a raccoon figure on the right foreshadowing Raccacoonie. This mirror is an Alice in Wonderland style looking glass, the first of the recurring circles that lead to the ultimate bagel, and it depicts a fantasy the movie never once gives us: these three characters truly happy together. Evelyn wipes away a tear. She also covers Joy's mouth because, according to the directors, the song is Aqua's Barbie Girl, and Evelyn didn't want her daughter singing "you can brush my hair undress me everywhere". Son Lux's piano music evokes Harold Arlen's Over the Rainbow; like Dorothy dreaming of Oz, Evelyn is dreaming of an alternate life path.

We glide through the looking glass into the innermost tier, the apartment, a nod to Robert Zemeckis's impossible mirror shot from Contact, one of my favorite shots ever. Behind Evelyn is a pair of googly eyes on laundry bag 042, the one she will later be looking for. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, so for Evelyn the meaning is missing. Waymond leaves googly eyes where he knows she will look, because she refuses to really look at him. Then a detail I love: Michelle Yeoh bobs her head and returns to her anxiety. That is the gesture characters make when they verse jump, so her mind was drifting somewhere happier.

The laundromat tier makes the Wangs employees first and family second

Daniel Kwan told the Script Notes podcast the film is an intersection between the multiverse and the immigrant experience, describing "a questioning of like life paths and decisions" that he hears when his mother talks about her past. So I believe the root myth of this movie is an immigrant mother trying to find her way home. For families like this, home and workplace merge, and laundry and tax forms spill into the home. The front door of their apartment is a laundromat door reading employees only: you go through the business to reach the family.

Joy spaces out staring at the black void in the spinning washer, much like the bagel she is drawn into later. Just as Waymond breaks Evelyn's dread by turning her left with a loving embrace, Becky does the same for Joy. It is Becky pushing Joy to introduce her to Gong Gong as her girlfriend. Joy warns Becky her mom might say something like you're fat, setting up the key exchange later. Daniel Kwan elaborated on the Director's Cut podcast that for Asian American immigrant parents with no time to talk, saying you're getting fat is a way to say I love you and I see you; the podcast also recalled Kwan's mom shouting exactly that from a taxi at a first meeting.

Waymond packs the cookies for Deirdre after Evelyn goes downstairs, knowing she would snap at him. Evelyn slides a stool with her foot, foreshadowing the hot dog finger universe, and the bearded customer's mention of his wife's perfume foreshadows her turning his grenade into perfume. Ke Huy Quan, a child actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies who later worked as a stunt coordinator on the 2000 X-Men film, built three Waymonds, which Michelle Yeoh described to Vanity Fair: a squirrel, an eagle for Alpha Waymond and a fox for CEO Waymond. He grabs something from the register that may be a Bluetooth or maybe the umbrella he later uses.

Evelyn speaks Cantonese to her father but Mandarin to her husband, so Joy's language barrier with Gong Gong is not entirely her fault; Evelyn is both a physical and linguistic barrier. After calling Joy fat, Michelle Yeoh's subtle turns back show she knows she hurt her. The close up of Joy crying in the car, without Becky in frame, was a pickup shot added when test audiences didn't get that this was a mother and daughter story. Waymond adds googly eyes to the thermostat because Evelyn will turn off the AC. Even the title breaks unevenly: everything is Evelyn's crisis, everywhere arrives about an hour and a half in as Jobu pulls her apart, and all at once comes at the very end as her ability to balance it all.

At the IRS, Deirdre and Alpha Waymond set the rules

On the drive they pass a pizza sign spinner, another life path Evelyn later uses to weaponize a riot shield. In the elevator Alpha Waymond hands her Bluetooths, the Matrix beat where Morpheus activates Neo with a phone. The opening doors frame her life path in 4x3, the ratio the Daniels chose for flashbacks to give a home movie aesthetic, and one flash shows teenage goth Joy with a black key ring: the black bagel's first sneaky cameo.

Jamie Lee Curtis's Deirdre Beaubeirdre wears banana yellow inspired by a real 2005 photo of a Cincinnati IRS agent. It was apparently her choice to put the watch over the wrist brace, which might come from crashing her husband's car into a neighbor's kitchen, something she alludes to here. Deirdre circles Evelyn's karaoke receipt in thick black, a bagel with the karaoke memory at its core, and lists hobbies that are really her alternate life paths. In the janitor's closet Alpha Waymond says "every rejection every disappointment has led you here to this moment." The cure is not to stop daydreaming but to appreciate the moment you're in. Alpha Deirdre punches in, Curtis doing a Michael Myers impression after hiding in closets as Laurie Strode.

When Alpha Waymond verse jumps, the ratio shifts from spherical 1.85 to 1 to anamorphic 2.39 to 1, used from then on whenever a stylized reality sets in. His fanny pack becomes a weapon, important symbolism for Ke Huy Quan, who stepped back after being typecast in stereotypical emasculated comedic parts. He flips it at three guards: one ducks, he hits the second, whose head recoils into the third. It is classic Jackie Chan, classic Three Stooges.

Jobu Tupaki toggles the multiverse like a TV dial

Jobu flips through realities with her hand in the same position for a different purpose each time: tagging the bagel symbol, crashing a bus, holding a beer. The pizza spinner is now a charred corpse reading hail bagel. Alpha Waymond quotes Nine Days' Story of a Girl, which returns later. The fight music is Debussy's Clair de Lune, reprised when Evelyn realizes she loves Deirdre.

The car scene was shot with Michelle Yeoh on green screen, and the hand grabbing her is Daniel Scheinert's in Deirdre's sweater. Her zipping backward through sidewalks, a train station, a library and a church is background material the Daniels and their cinematographer gathered while location scouting. In the movie star universe, with a training sequence like Kill Bill Vol. 2's Pai Mei scenes, they mix in real red carpet shots of Michelle Yeoh from the Crazy Rich Asians premiere, the film that inspired Ke Huy Quan to return to acting. Based on a poster in the lobby, the premiere she attends is Everything Everywhere All at Once itself.

The everything bagel means everything can equal nothing

In the hot dog finger universe Daniel Kwan cameos on a poster; he also plays the mugger. There is a 2001: A Space Odyssey homage. The bagel is revealed exactly one hour in, to the second. It is the film's symbol for nihilism: everything, if you choose, can equal nothing. But the longer Evelyn looks, a blinding light emits from the void, so she sees meaning that Jobu cannot, though it has no visible form yet.

Alpha Gong Gong's coffee maker wheelchair nods to Mr. Fusion in Back to the Future. Evelyn's "do you mean Ratatouille" mix up honours Alexander Wang, late father of producer Jonathan Wang and namesake of the Wang family, who apparently mixed up movie titles like this; the film is dedicated to him. Waymond answers Becky's call with hola because Joy mentioned Becky is half Mexican. Scheinert cameos as a boss named Richard Long, a nod to his 2019 film The Death of Dick Long. The Alphas credited as Trophy and Bigger Trophy are Brian and Andy Le, who choreographed many fights. One extra Evelyn bumps is another producer, whose name might have inspired Waymond's. Her pinky punch nods to Kill Bill Vol. 2 with a Super Smash Bros sound effect, the fake credits read Evelyn Quan, and Raccacoonie is voiced by Randy Newman.

Jobu's flickering weapons include a snowy owl, a leg of meat and an Oscar statuette, as if this movie is predicting its own future. Evelyn turns them into a kid's drawing, likely from Joy's drawing seen earlier. Jobu's book riffs on Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go, with art based on Persepolis.

I counted 69 alternate realities in one rapid fire sequence

They recycle through several times, but I counted 69 different ones, which cannot be a coincidence. They include a Terminator Evelyn, a poultry plant, bison in the American West, a horned reptilian monster, a marble statue, an animated Evelyn, a skeleton, the Red Room from Twin Peaks, a drone strike image, an Illuminati conspiracy thumbnail and an Easter egg drawing. My favorite is a Zoom chat with the small VFX team, who composed the movie's 550 VFX shots over calls just like this, which is so impressive.

Waymond's kindness turns the bullets into googly eyes

Nihilistic Evelyn's eyes fill with black, contrasting a googly eyed lantern behind her. In an impossible shot Joy appears in two places at once. Evelyn lets the karaoke machine crash behind her, and she and Joy become rocks, chosen so Joy could make her mother feel small. Joy admits: "I was hoping you would see something I didn't." Meanwhile foxy Waymond delivers the most romantic line of the film, and speaking as a married guy, there really is no bagel more delicious than just doing the laundry and taxes with your spouse or partner.

The Daniels light Michelle Yeoh with an orbiting ring light; she now sits in the center of the bagel's light, and as she hugs Waymond we finally catch him placing googly eyes. Like Neo, she stops bullets and turns them into googly eyes, one a third eye on her forehead, then weaponizes love with the perfume and the spinal adjustment. Hot dog Deirdre plays the actual opening of Clair de Lune and wears a foot brace. Evelyn tells her father the girl is a mess, just like her, and Becky smiles without knowing the words. I really appreciate that this acceptance is not enough for Joy, because a parent's love can't always bring a nihilistic kid back. In the parking lot Evelyn unloads every nag, yet chooses to be here with Joy, cherishing these few specks of time.

The center of the bagel was the karaoke memory all along

The ending doesn't fix everything; the business is still a mess and Evelyn still drifts. Her calculator shows the old upside down grade school joke, an ability to laugh at herself. The center was in the opening shot: the karaoke memory, which Deirdre circled in black, is the one moment never shown objectively, only in that fantasy mirror. So the film concludes happiness is a choice, there if we open our eyes and cherish it.

This film opened my eyes to the immigrant story of Daniel Kwan's family, and it reminded me how my mother cheered me up from bullying by driving me to a five dollar matinee. She would never say she didn't like something, only that it was interesting, which is probably why people now get on my case for never saying anything bad about movies. It's because I do not believe in bad movies, "only interesting ones," because somewhere in the multiverse someone appreciated it.

Is cherishing those specks of joy enough of an answer to nihilism, or does the film's bagel still leave you wanting more?