Movies
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ SXSW Review – A Magical Triumph of Cinematic Storytelling
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directing duo known collectively as “The Daniels,” haven’t directed a feature film together since 2016’s Swiss Army Man (review), with Kwan branching off to work on television shows like FX’s Legion and Scheinert directing a feature film on his own in 2019’s The Death of Dick Long (review). Six years after their last joint feature film effort, they return with the utterly delightful, hilarious and touching Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that gives actress Michelle Yeoh one of the best roles of her career.
The synopsis for Everything Everywhere All at Once simply describes the film as “a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action-adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) who can’t seem to finish her taxes.” While that’s not an inaccurate statement, it’s leaving out the most important part of the premise: the existence of the multiverse. You see, Evelyn is in a rut. She’s got a husband (Ke Huy Quan; The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) ready to divorce her, a father (James Hong; Big Trouble in Little China) who has never approved of her life choices, a daughter (Stephanie Hsu; Awkwafina is Norah From Queens) struggling to bring her new girlfriend (Tallie Medel) into the family and an impending audit from the IRS, courtesy of one very grumpy agent (Jamie Lee Curtis; relishing in her character’s cantankerousness).
As if all of that wasn’t enough, a version of her husband from another universe arrives to warn Evelyn of the impending destruction of everything within the multiverse. He tells her that she is the only version of herself capable of stopping it, before giving her a headset that will allow her to tap into alternate versions of herself. By doing so, she is able to gain the special skills of those alternate Evelyns, and it is with these new abilities that she will fight the mysterious figure hellbent on destroying the multiverse.
So, yeah. Much like its title implies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a lot. And yet, it all works somehow. Should we be surprised? The Daniels did make a successful film out of Daniel Radcliffe playing a farting corpse, after all. While the concept of the multiverse has gained mainstream popularity thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the film feels more indebted to the interdimensional cable episodes of Rick and Morty mixed with the stylized glamour of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (and especially the latter’s penchant for metatextual references to other films). That being said, Everything Everywhere All at Once is uniquely its own beast and is almost impossible to describe. It’s going to be even harder to sell, which might explain why it took six years to get made, but those that take the plunge will find themselves witnessing what’s bound to be one of the best movies of the year.
At its core, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a story of a woman learning to cope and move past intergenerational trauma. We see the effects that her father’s disapproval has had on Evelyn’s life, and throughout the course of the film, she begins to realize that she is doing the same thing to her daughter Joy. It’s a vicious cycle and one that only something as bonkers as a sci-fi adventure through the multiverse can fix. The film will have you doubling over with laughter one moment and have you tearing up the next. It’s a seamless emotional journey filtered through the limitless lens afforded by the genre.
As mentioned above, Yeoh is simply astounding here. In Evelyn, she gets to play a truly vibrant and funny character that practically leaps off the screen. This isn’t to undersell the rest of the cast, however. Quan is given his first lead role in nearly 20 years and provides many of the film’s funniest moments. Hong has the least to do, but the 93-year-old actor is always a welcome presence. It’s Hsu, however, who surprises the most. In a role that was originally meant to be played by Awkwafina, Hsu is a revelation. To say more about her role in the film would delve too far into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that most of the film’s pathos comes from her performance. This actress is going to be a star.
On a technical level, the film is a marvel (no pun intended). Aided by Paul Rogers‘ frenetic editing and frequent match cuts as Evelyn journeys from universe to universe, the film’s 132-minute runtime flies by. The narrative is fairly straightforward, but the Daniels use the cinematic medium to find new and creative ways to push the story along. What makes Everything Everywhere All at Once so genuinely charming and innovative is its complete and total willingness to get weird. Jenny Slate punts a Pomeranian (and uses it as a weapon)! Jamie Lee Curtis does martial arts! Assassins jump onto butt plug-shaped IRS awards! There’s a universe where everyone has hot dog wieners for hands! There are plenty of other oddities, but why ruin the many, many surprises that the film has in store?
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a magical triumph of cinematic storytelling. It’s just a delight from beginning to end. It’s bonkers. It’s hilarious. It’s violent. It’s charming. It’s sweet. It’s great. You’ve never seen anything like this before, so enjoy the ride.
A24 will release Everything Everywhere All at Once theatrically on March 25.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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