140 min | R | March 25, 2022 | A24
Evelyn Wang runs a failing laundromat and gets audited by the IRS. Then she learns she is the only version of herself who can save the multiverse. The Daniels turn a tax audit into a story about whether a mother can love her daughter back.
Evelyn Wang runs a failing laundromat. She is buried under tax receipts, a disappointed father, a husband she barely notices, and a daughter she cannot understand. An IRS audit becomes the doorway into a multiverse where every choice she did not make spawned another version of her. The Daniels build a science fiction spectacle out of a midlife crisis. The film is not about saving the universe. It is about a mother deciding whether her daughter is worth staying for.
Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn as a woman who has spent decades shrinking. Yeoh moves through martial arts, melodrama, and slapstick without losing the exhausted center of the character. Ke Huy Quan plays Waymond with a gentleness that the film reframes as strength, and Quan makes the argument that kindness is a survival strategy. Stephanie Hsu plays Joy and her multiverse counterpart Jobu Tupaki as grief wearing glitter. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre with hunched posture and total commitment. James Hong sharpens every scene he enters as Gong Gong.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert direct and write, and they build the multiverse through editing rather than budget. Evelyn jumps between lives by performing small absurd acts, and each jump triggers a burst of rapid montage that cuts dozens of realities into seconds. The film matches actions across universes so a gesture in the laundromat completes inside a kung fu film or an animated parody. The production design swings from fluorescent IRS drudgery to a universe where people have hot dogs for fingers, and the contrast is both the joke and the point. The sound design stacks competing realities until the noise itself becomes a portrait of overload.
The film risks collapse at every turn. The maximalism could curdle into static and the emotion could drown in the gimmick. The Daniels hold the structure together by tying every absurd flourish back to a single broken relationship. Evelyn’s power comes from her failures rather than her triumphs, and the film argues that the woman who got everything wrong is the one who can fix it. Underneath the googly eyes and the everything bagel sits a plain question about whether love survives disappointment. The answer is the whole movie.