Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once looks both admirably understated in its ostensible theme and wildly ambitious in its execution. The film stars Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and is co-written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known simply as “Daniels”, and perhaps best recognized for 2016’s Swiss Army Man). A thematic mix of underpromising in its setting and premise and overdelivering in its execution and exploration is at least partly a key to its positive reception thus far. Specifically, the way the audio is edited in this trailer lends much to this overall impression.

On its surface, the film is supposedly about “an exhausted Chinese-American woman who can’t seem to finish her taxes.” In the opening scene, at least, this holds true, with an audio bridge from the accountant (a near-unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis) confronting Yeoh’s character, Evelyn Wang, who dutifully but barely acknowledges. A clock ticking motif quickly settles in, alongside some unnerving cello on the downbeat. At 0:17 we get a terribly outsized percussive hit to accompany the visual of Wang closing the door of a washer at a laundromat, and again at 0:20-0:21 as Wang places her eyes on some googly eyes—which turn out to be a major visual motif. At 0:32 we see the first instance of Wang occupying and becoming aware of her presence in multiple universes, simultaneously; the sound design effectively reinforces how such a sensation might feel, with its wobbling, warped synth.

The next segment of the trailer focuses on exposition, with Wang’s husband from another universe begging this universe’s Wang to help him. This time we have a high-pitched sound of indeterminate instrumental origin matched by an equally low hum. Note how from 0:49 to 0:55 we hear Wang’s scream in slightly different pitches, and in a vaguely melodic pattern. This really effectively reinforces the idea that these are variations on Evelyn Wang across universes—very similar, but not quite the same, yet by hearing these minute tonal variation at the same moment we can really hear the multiverse conceptually. A percussion section adds to the arrangement at 1:05 as the action picks up. The sonic design also helps convey the different laws of different universes that are completely foreign to us. For example, at 1:13 we hear something resembling many clinking glasses from afar, which presages 1:15, when a security guard seems to explode into shards of glass (really—just watch it).

Midway through the trailer, the original soundtrack is swapped out for David Bowie’s “Time” (from 1973’s Aladdin Sane). As a (female) narrator tells us that “the universe is so much bigger than you realize”, we simultaneously hear Bowie sing that “time—he’s waiting in the wings; he speaks of senseless things; his script is you and me, boy”, thus juxtaposing time and space and fulfilling the premise of the film’s title in this sense. In the visual montage that accompanies it, things get weirder and weirder, as a theoretically infinite array of universes, even ones that focus on the same person, would be wont to do. Note also at 1:50 the two sections of on-screen violence synched to the music, in a hyper-violent, Tarantino-esque fashion. Finally, we hear a strong counterpoint in Wang’s impassioned speech that “of all the place I could be, I just want to be here with you”, clearly and understandably unnerved and rattled by all the multiverse-based antics on display.

Then, at 2:13 we get some metadiegetic moments of sound/music as it appears as though the raccoon in the cage on screen is singing Bowie’s line, as is a version of Wang a moment later. The vocal refrain is chaotic and even joyous, as if celebrating the breakage of the liminal bonds of time and space. As if to underscore the ridiculousness of it all, the googly eyes we spotted earlier are back in full force—adorning not only people, but sentient rocks and more.

Finally, in a moment that takes all of three seconds on screen but must have taken far, far longer in the edit, we see a run through (perhaps most of?) Wang’s personas across universes in a series of split-second frames and clips, accompanied by a piano flourish in the Bowie track. Immediately preceding this is the microtonal creak made from a bowed cymbal, not unlike what you’d hear in a horror film. This piano excursion leads directly back into Bowie’s wordless track on “la” and the main title cards, with googly eyes flying everywhere. It is all, in a word, absurd. It’s an embrace of the absurd, a celebration of it, and a showcase of all the possibilities therein.

Everything Everywhere All at Once debuts at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas on March 11 ahead of a wide release March 25, 2022.

— Curtis Perry