Immersed, shocked, humored, slapped, broken, and healed are all emotions of watching maybe the best movie ever directed by Daniels: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. The film swirls around a middle-aged Chinese immigrant by the name of Evelyn Wong (Michelle Yeoh) who must save the multiverse from being destroyed. Wong is transported from her taxes, stressed relationships with her daughter (Stephanie Hsu), husband (Ke Huy Quan), and father (James Hong) and job of owning a laundromat to fantasy and action-packed worlds galore. But while you witness hotdog fingers and an everything bagel black hole, the story of a Chinese family carries the heart of the plot by exploring topics of intergenerational trauma, queerness, immigration, depression, and existentialism.

While the fusion of genres, Hong Kong toned-cinema, and stunning visuals kept my brain on a two hour high, the details and relationships interlaced between the laughs and cries were what healed my heart and head. Like the flashbacks of harsh memories from Wong that result in consequences for her daughter, Joy Wang: like the regret of immigration, marriage, or motherhood. Or the experiences of Wang, who struggles with homophobia and acceptance of her girlfriend within her family: similar to the common experiences of frustration and pain of being queer in a Chinese. Even “Racacoonie”, a confusion of which Wong confuses the rat with a raccoon in Ratatouille: a display of the difficulty and humor of communicating past barriers of language. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once displays Asian and Asian Americans as humans in real and raw form: struggling, kind, mean, misunderstood, and everything in between. 

Whether you come for the new expansion of the multiverse, a star-studded cast, the emotional wave of an immigrant family, or all the above, it is worth seeing.