Film: Everything Everywhere All at Once
The first film of 2023 — and it works on every level simultaneously.
Rating: 4.5 / 5
The first film we watched as a family in 2023. It works simultaneously as light entertainment and as serious philosophical inquiry — which is the whole point.
Evelyn — an Asian mother archetype — discovers her ability to traverse parallel universes roughly twenty minutes in. The multiverse mechanics align surprisingly well with quantum physics speculation. But the film is really about something simpler and harder: how do you choose to live when none of it may matter?
The most memorable scene: Evelyn and Joy as rocks in a desert wasteland, finding dry humour in existence’s absurdity. An image that draws from the Sisyphus myth — and Camus’s response to it.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Two worldviews face off across the film:
- Waymond: optimism, kindness, the radical choice to see good
- Evelyn: presence — “Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you”
Neither wins. Both are right. That tension is what makes the film land.
“When I choose to see the good side of things… it’s how I learned to survive.” — Waymond