Rating: 9/10 | Verdict: Can’t recommend

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why in the world would I give a movie such a high rating and then say I can’t recommend it? Allow me to explain…

The TL;DR version is that this movie is exceptionally well made, has many positive themes, and is bursting with fun creative elements that have a lot of merit, but there are several moments that celebrate illicit and immoral sexual practices that ruined the movie for me. Not to mention that I fundamentally disagree with the movie’s overall philosophy as a Christian despite agreeing with some of its messages.

I’ll start off with a short description of the premise.

Everything Everywhere All at Once focuses on the Wang family, who immigrated from China to the USA and own a laundromat. As we are introduced to the family, we start to notice fault lines are opening up. Evelyn is addicted to her work and dissatisfied with her seemingly boring husband, Waymond. The laundromat has fallen on hard times and is in the middle of being audited by the IRS (which isn’t going well). And the family is struggling to accept their daughter Joy’s decision to date Becky, her girlfriend, since China has more conservative values than the Wang’s current home country.

This all seems like a relatively normal setup to start a movie, until things start to get crazy.

Basically, there’s a multiverse. And in a parallel universe, Evelyn is a brilliant scientist. This Evelyn studied the multiverse and invented a device that allows anyone to “access” their selves in the other universes in order to benefit from their skills, experience, and so on. But someone with the intent of ending everything for every universe has gotten a hold of the technology too. Even worse, the Evelyn Wang that invented the multiverse connection device is gone. Will the Evelyn in our universe step up and help? But how is a relatively average middle-aged woman who runs a laundromat supposed to save the entire multiverse?

Alright, now that everyone’s sorta got the lay of the land, let’s first talk about what I really liked about this movie.

I love how creative this movie is. The fact that the movie is about a multiverse opens up lots of opportunities for zipping between wacky and fun worlds that capture the imagination in a (mostly) good way. The editing and visuals are done extremely well. There are many unexpected twists and turns of the plot that keep you on the edge of your seat. And the absurd humor is often–but not always, which I’ll get to in a bit–enjoyable.

The characters in this movie are also great. The central action surrounds the three members of the Wang family, and there’s plenty of character development and depth that gets explored for each one of them from start to finish. Joy in particular struggles with depression, and the movie powerfully captures the movement from despair to hope that comes with healing. Unconditional love, self-sacrifice, and thankfulness for everyday blessings are shown to be necessary for being part of a family and living life well, which Christians can get behind.

I walked out of the movie theatre with that feeling of awe and thankfulness for the God-given gifts of human creativity and movie magic that I experienced often when I was younger and had my own filmmaking aspirations. I hadn’t felt that way walking out of a movie in a long time.

But unfortunately, I also walked out of the theatre with a bad taste in my mouth.

This is due to that negative content that ruined the movie for me and means I can’t recommend it. To not go into too much detail, there is a montage full of moments and imagery that is meant to display the pure and good things about life. Some of these things are indeed good, but several are overtly sexual in nature (or less overt but definitely still meant to be sexual) and blatantly immoral. Several scenes also involve absurdist humor that is overtly sexual, and I personally did not care for it.

To clarify, I’m not a Christian who thinks that all sex is bad. I am saying that the depictions of sexual practices the movie was clearly claiming are good and acceptable can be best described as sinful from a Biblical perspective.

This twisted sexual humor runs throughout the movie, and to me was like a stain sullying a beautiful piece of art that I would have otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.

I cannot finish this review without a brief discussion of the movie’s overall philosophy. As I mentioned earlier, this movie is brimming with hope, and offers thankfulness for the everyday blessings of life as the solution to despair. That is good, but in the end, that is all this movie has to offer by way of a solution. Another key takeaway from this movie is that life is ultimately meaningless, so you might as well experience as many good things as you can while you’re still alive.

I saw another reviewer describe this worldview as “optimistic nihilism,” and I can’t think of a better description.

Christians will agree that thankfulness goes a long way to fighting despair, but we do not believe it is the whole solution. The true solution to despair–the only one that brings lasting hope and healing–is trusting in God and His promises that any difficulties we experience in our lives are for a good, eternal purpose:

“We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:28 (CSB)

No matter how “optimistic”, any kind of nihilism ultimately leaves you in a place where if the difficulties of this world get to be too much, you might as well be dead. Through belief in God and trust in His promises, our lives and the suffering we inevitably experience gain a purpose and value that no amount of optimism can provide.

To sum it up, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a masterfully made and thought-provoking film about what makes life worth living. There is no other movie like it, and it is one of those that is likely to inspire the next generation of filmmakers. But twisted humor touted as pure mars the beauty and artistry of the film’s visuals and hopeful message, which in the end falls just short of the truth.