I suspected that I would hate this movie before I saw it, and of course I was right.  I know someone who watched it and then complained that she didn’t understand any of it, or why it was made.  And yet this currently has an 8.2 IMBd rating and is considered by many to be a great work of art.  I do not concur.

Made by Daniels (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, the guys behind the wacky Swiss Army Man), this movie is ostensibly about a woman who tries to do her taxes.  Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) runs a laundromat with her husband Wayland (Ke Huy Quan).  While her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) rebels and her father (James Hong) turns senile, Evelyn is forced to confront an aggressive IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) regarding her very questionable deductions.  All of this family drama is thrown into complete turmoil when a man from another dimension takes over her husband’s body and demands that Evelyn save the universe, because only she can.  Evelyn is thrown into different alternate realities, taught that her innate abilities can fight a being trying to reduce all the universes onto a bagel, and save her family in the process.  Got that?

For about an hour of the film’s two hour and twenty minute running time nothing makes much sense.  Evelyn’s life is one of drudgery and toil and her family seems dismally unhappy.  Then comes the craziness of the alternate realities, several of which are sampled, none of which seem appealing.  Eventually the identity of the villain, Jobu Tapaki, is revealed, and then it becomes much more traditional, if still chaotic lunacy.  And that’s my second biggest complaint about the movie: after all the mind-bending lunacy of all the different universes is established the story suddenly becomes a very traditional, straitlaced familial drama of love and acceptance.  It should have remained crazy and chaotic, refusing to make any sense at all; I would respect it more.

My biggest complaint, of course, is the multiverse.  As a firm opponent of the multiverse as a realistic concept or a burgeoning movie plot staple I despise the whole framework that this raises.  If anything can happen, nothing matters.  Choices are unimportant, since a different choice would be made in an alternate universe.  Who’s to say that we shouldn’t be watching that other universe?  It’s all nonsense.  Now I will certainly admit that imagination runs rampant in these portals; the hot dog finger universe is undeniably amusing and even poignant.  But it isn’t real, and I don’t care about it.  Good movies create their own world where consistency matters.  In a multiverse where anything can and does happen, what does it matter what happens?  That’s why I cannot recommend this highly imaginative but ultimately very conservative comedy-drama to anyone who takes cinema seriously.  I may be out of touch on this newly popular film format but I don’t care, I hate it.  ☆.  7 July 2022.