Everything everywhere all at once a great viewing experience and Oscar favourite

Fabulous, funny and phantasmagorical. Clever, cockeyed and completely crazy. Deeply delicious, daft and delirious. Brilliant, brave and bold. Jumping through time and mixing up genres, the film Everything Everywhere All at Once is all this and more. The indie hit of 2022 is also a primo contender at the 95th Academy Awards, with winners hitting the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 12. Everything Everywhere All at Once has 11 nominations to lead the pack.

Expect something great to happen for this film in general, and its dazzling cast in particular. Not only is this anti-establishment rogue production up for Best Picture, but “The Daniels” (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) are nominated together for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Michelle Yeoh up for Best Actor

Moving on to the cast, Michelle Yeoh is up for Best Actor. Ke Huy Quan (coming out of retirement and best known as a kid actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies) is up for Best Supporting Actor. And both Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu are competing for Best Supporting Actress.

Sometimes Oscar nominations are inappropriate or even a joke. Not for this film. Find it, watch it, by any means necessary. It is too important a film to ignore and too much fun to miss.

The convoluted plot cannot be easily summarized. The story – and the same actors – jumps between parallel universes, swerving into martial arts madness and action that contrasts with Planet Earth’s most mundane daily life.

This earthbound universe revolves around the California laundromat run by Yeoh’s character. Her husband, played by Quan, is trying to serve divorce papers, but things are too chaotic to get it done. Their daughter, played by Hsu, finds them both annoying. She has her own issues. Meanwhile, Curtis (who is clearly having a blast) is an authoritarian IRS agent conducting an audit of the laundromat’s books.

Asian-American showcase

Enough of the plot. There is so much more going on, including the off-screen sense that Hollywood is finally showcasing another Asian-American story and celebrating the actors who delivered the goods. This is diversity in action and long overdue.

Yeoh and her dual characters are the centrepieces. She plays a tired, shopworn mother, housewife and small business owner with heartbreaking poignancy. Then, in a flash, she becomes the martial arts dynamo we have seen in other films.

The most impressive strength of Everything Everywhere All at Once is how the fractured love story at the tender heart of the film – and the move towards redemption as Yeoh and Huan – is never obliterated by the frenetic action scenes. Nor does the movie get maudlin about it. And that allows us to jump right back into nihilistic, violent madness without losing track of why we are watching it all unfold.

If Everything Everywhere All at Once does not win a clutch of Oscars, it will still rank as a great experience for audiences – and worthy of repeated viewings. But it would be hugely satisfying to have a “small” film slay the giants, such as Avatar: The Way of Water, Top Gun: Maverick and Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, which are also among the 10 films up for Best Picture.