Everything Everywhere All at Once

As the title implies, there’s a lot going on in Everything Everywhere All at Once, whether it’s a broad workplace comedy, a dysfunctional family saga, a martial-arts epic, an existential character study, an offbeat science-fiction adventure, or an old-fashioned romance.

Even if such ambition sometimes exceeds its grasp, this freewheeling tour through the metaverse is visually striking and consistently amusing, with its assortment of visual quirks and oddball characters.

Indeed, this subversive, genre-bending mayhem from the filmmaking tandem of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Swiss Army Man) remains emotionally grounded beneath its high-minded silliness.

The film opens with Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) hovering over a nightmarish pile of receipts in the back room of a laundromat she owns with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). As their marriage is crumbling, Evelyn is the caretaker for her ailing father (James Hong) and trying to accept the sexual preferences of her daughter (Stephanie Hsu).

We sympathize with her plight, never more so than when she desires to flee an appointment with a ruthless tax auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis). As it turns out, Waymond has been hiding secrets, not only about himself but the entire family.

She is just one of many Evelyns dispatched throughout the metaverse to alternate and parallel worlds. Waymond is trying to convince her to give up on this sorry existence and move along. “You’re living your worst life,” he explains.

She becomes the ultimate multitasker as she’s pulled into a surreal battle to hold her family together on Earth, despite its flaws. Ordinary objects like bagels, fanny packs, and vaguely phallic trophies are given otherworldly powers. And she develops hot-dog fingers, for some reason.

Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) showcases her versatility in a fully committed performance of physical dexterity and emotional depth.

There’s a dazzling audacity to the bilingual storytelling, which obliterates the line between reality and fantasy — often arbitrarily making up the rules as it goes along, to the extent many moviegoers might struggle to piece it all together.

Still, perhaps that’s the best way to playfully examine the absurdities of the human condition. Bordering on sensory overload, all of the narrative misdirection and self-reflexive manipulation might not yield much of a deeper meaning. But even if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s a lot of fun getting there.

Rated R, 139 minutes.