There’s a lot happening in All the pieces In every single place All at As soon as—and it goes on so relentlessly, and for thus lengthy—that after some time a kookiness overload begins to weigh it down. As soon as you’ve got absorbed the wild fanny-pack smackdown, the marauding bagel, and the sight of a monstrous Jamie Lee Curtis tearing down a door, chances are you’ll be a bit too tuckered to take care of pleasure for the film’s different oddities—the puppy-flinging, the butt-plugging, the floppy hot-dog-fingered palms. The uproar feels limitless.

It isn’t fully stunning that it is a image by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who write and direct collectively underneath the title Daniels. Their debut function, the 2016 Swiss Military Man—the story of a fart-propelled corpse, performed by Daniel Radcliffe—was no run-of-the-mill affair both. However All the pieces is vastly extra advanced—or difficult, anyway. The motivating notion is that each selection made by each human being creates a “branching universe”—an alternate actuality by which each rejected risk takes root and thrives, unbiased of the originating human’s existence, which in fact continues on.

This unsuspected multiverse is revealed sooner or later to a frazzled Chinese language-American girl named Evelyn Wang (the ageless Hong Kong motion queen Michelle Yeoh). Evelyn runs a coin-op laundry in suburban LA together with her husband, Waymond (onetime Goonie and Indiana Jones sidekick Ke Huy Quan), her daughter, Pleasure (Stephanie Hsu, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and, in the mean time, her historic father, Gong Gong (the nice James Hong). Issues aren’t going properly for the Wangs. There are tax troubles, for one factor, and Waymond needs a divorce. Throughout a dismal go to to an IRS workplace, one thing unusual occurs. Evelyn is driving up in an elevator with Waymond when he all of the sudden morphs into one other particular person—properly, one other Waymond. This model of her husband tells Evelyn that she’s within the crosshairs of “an incredible evil”—an entity known as Jobu Tupaki. He warns her to watch out. “I’ve seen you die a thousand methods,” he says.

Evelyn quickly finds herself whipping by way of dimensions on a madly edited tour of all the choice lives she may need lived, however did not. We see her wielding a scary-big knife at a Benihana-style steakhouse, and swanning round on the glittery premiere of a brand new martial arts film by which she stars. There’s additionally a Bollywood universe, and a few sort of pizza world, and—one of many movie’s most lovable interludes—a world with no folks in it in any respect: solely a pair of rocks snuggling on a slope. Within the midst of all this interdimensional chaos, Evelyn checks in with the unique Waymond: “I noticed my life with out you,” she says. “It was lovely.”

Given the film’s crazed tempo, which is exhausting over the course of greater than two hours, its sudden tenderness comes as a shock. We see the waxing and waning of affection and the generally attempting dynamics of households, and may solely marvel on the absence of hipster detachment with which they’re introduced. This can be a film with out an oz of cynicism in its narrative bones. (Alternatively, these looking for timeless human truths would possibly want there have been extra right here than “It’s a must to be variety” and “We will do no matter we would like, nothing issues.”)

One of many image’s most admirable achievements is its provision—ultimately—of a real starring function for the nice Michelle Yeoh, an incandescent display presence who has been making movies for practically 40 years now. Lengthy might she proceed to reign.