Kindness Is A Weapon: A Review of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
(Spoilers ahead for Everything Everywhere All At Once.)
It only took the first few lines of dialogue in Everything Everywhere All At Once for me to know — I was witnessing something very different here. Not only because of the film’s rollicking and inventive visuals, but because its story knew me so familiarly that it would thunder deeply within my soul for the days and weeks to come. The opening exchange of the movie between Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is conducted in a seamless mix of English and Mandarin, melding languages so easily that it becomes a single language: Chinglish. The sound of my childhood. Mandarin, I later joked with a friend, is my native tongue, but Chinglish is my mother tongue. Because, even though it’s been years since I’ve heard it, I understood every line Evelyn and Waymond spoke, fluently and without subtitles.
Everything Everywhere All At Once, I realized in this moment, was a homecoming.
On a surface level, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a sci-fi film starring a Chinese American family. It’s tax season, and Evelyn and Waymond’s laundromat…
