In one year, Everything Everywhere All At Once became the most-awarded film of all time. Its awards run up to 165, with 7 Oscar wins and 11 nominations. How did a small movie, with a budget of $14.3 million and a visual effects team of exactly six people, become such a huge success? The answer lies in its breathtaking quality and immaculate storytelling.

The movie centers around Evelyn, a stressed-out first-generation Chinese American woman, mother, and business owner. She’s struggling with both her broken dreams, and more literally, her laundromat business, which is currently undergoing an IRS audit. Her husband, Waymond, attempts to lessen her overwhelming stress, but Evelyn interprets his lightheartedness as weakness and considers him too cowardly to function without her. Despite Waymond’s optimism, he is tired of their marriage, and divorce seems imminent. On top of everything, Evelyn is unwilling to accept her twenty-odd daughter, Joy, and her lesbian relationship, citing the visit of her judgemental father, Gong Gong. 

Everything Everywhere All At Once tackles a plethora of issues that are found in first-generation immigrant families in the United States: one of the most notable throughout the movie is the intense familial turmoil that plagues Evelyn and her family. Evelyn is an immigrant, living her life in a country that is foreign to her in every way, especially in terms of culture, societal standards, and language. As we see with her inability to accept Joy’s sexuality, she struggles to understand the modern-day culture she is living in. She lives tied up in the past, dwelling on her own failures in an attempt to please her father. These struggles become the point of the movie—encapsulating the characters, plot, and most uniquely, the science fiction. While Everything Everywhere All At Once’s take on the concept of the multiverse itself is intriguing and well-thought-out, the multiverse’s connection to Evelyn is more impressive. Throughout the movie, Alphaverse-Waymond (a seemingly braver version of Evelyn’s Waymond) says to her, “With every passing moment, you fear you might have missed your chance to make something of your life. I'm here to tell you, every rejection, every disappointment has led you here.” Evelyn is the only hope for the multiverse because there are so many versions of her that have been able to accomplish what she hasn’t. As Evelyn explores the “more successful” versions of herself—these possible futures she could have had—she begins to understand herself and her family as well. This type of self-reflection plays into one of the most admirable qualities of the movie: its ability to develop the intentions, fears, and personalities of each character. Her strict upbringing makes it difficult for her to understand and communicate with Joy, her child, who grew up in the United States, and while we can understand Evelyn’s struggle to adapt, we can also understand the hurt Joy went through due to Evelyn’s parenting. 

Everything Everywhere All At Once reflects a larger trend in Hollywood: the “millennial parental apology fantasy.” Many popular movies in the last few decades, like Inside Out and Coraline, have been about the child realizing what their parents have done (in a good way) for them; this newer portrayal of parent-child relationships focuses on the parent realizing what they have done (in a not so good way) to their kids. They reflect what a lot of millennial second-generation Americans, who are becoming parents themselves, are now remembering. Many times, the roots of emotional abuse and toxicity lie in intergenerational trauma, like how the strained relationship between Evelyn’s mother and herself passed on to her and Joy. Most movies of the parental apology fantasy category end with the parent and child starting their healing process and understanding each other much better. Everything Everywhere All At Once is both similar and different. Unlike most others, it centers around the parent, not the child, because it recognizes that the fantasy is for both the child and the parent. Every parent wants to find the apology that can fix everything and, most importantly, connect with their children again. Furthermore, the movie focuses on the parent needing to accept their child, rather than the child recognizing that their parent was subject to intergenerational trauma. By putting an impetus of change upon Evelyn’s character, rather than Joy’s, it subtly shifts blame from the child to their parent, something generally uncommon in film. In the end, does the apology succeed? No; it’s a fantasy because no such apology exists. The end of the movie drives home the idea that not all of the pain caused throughout Joy’s upbringing can just be solved with a single apology. But it’s clear to see that Evelyn and Joy end the movie better off than they begin. They’ve each accepted that the other will be a certain way and try to go from there.

With the record-breaking number of awards it’s won, it's clear that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie worth watching. But what really speaks to audiences is the way it tackles issues that are very close to home for immigrants and people of color through a sort of amazing fantasy world. By refusing to make any one character the objective villain, growing the personality and belief system of each character, and acknowledging that the choice to heal is often not an easy path to take, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a poignant look into culture clashes, trauma, and parenting wrapped up in an action-filled fantastical plot.