The filmmaking team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert go simply by "Daniels" and have been making weird, intense, maximalist videos that blend down-to-earth emotions and larger than life metaphors. A great example is "Interesting Ball" which you can watch here.
... youtube sure chose an interesting screengrab for that embedding.
Anyway.
EEAAO is exactly the film you would expect if you gave these guys an eight figure budget, two and a half hours of runtime, and superstars like Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Like if you enjoyed the above short, just go out and see the movie now.
From here on out, there will be spoilers.
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A tremendous amount of discourse about this movie has been the Asian representation. It has Asian stars, and the emotional story is about a mother who was an immigrant reconnecting with the daughter she disapproved of.
I find the praise very weird, because it certainly isn't the first movie with Asian representation. Yes it stars Michelle Yeoh but she is already a star, it's not like she was lacking public presence before. Why be excited that this random indy A24 movie has Asian actors and relevant themes?
The traditional answer is "because it's a big budget blockbuster that studios invested a ton of money in, a ton of advertising, and will be in every theater in America." Except it's not. It opened on like, 100 theaters, and had next to no advertising. This is not in anyway "Hollywood opening up."
Why get excited then that yet another indy film features this inclusion, when hundreds of other films have been this inclusive.
Because it's really really good.
People are excited that a phenomenally good and ground breaking work of art was also featuring a culture that usually does not get center stage. If people are discussing this twenty years from now as one of the most influential hundred films, they will have to be talking about a movie that is not all white.
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The word is "possibility."
The concept that connects this entire work, and all their works so far, is possibility. It's even the name of their earlier short, where they follow one lover's argument through different branching paths.
Possibility is... that what you could do at any moment is much larger than you think. In the middle of a fight with your greatest enemy you could get up and kiss him... or comb his hair, or rip off your shirt and stomp on it, or climb the bookcase, or eat your pocket change, or go out the door and leave and... go home, or get hit by a car, or run back in and take a surprise attack on your enemy.
The way people jump to different universes is by using this magic. They do something "weird" that is 100% physically possible, but completely out of expectation. (And the movie has a very pointed speech on what you "can't do" versus what "you're not allowed to do.") If they are weird enough, they set themselves on a different lifepath, and that gives them the skills that path would have in this universe.
Humor is so often the apt use of unexpected possibilities, and EEAAO takes every chance for this type of humor, surprising you while also calling back to earlier elements.
But possibility also means all the closed doors in our past. We had to make so many choices about who to be, that necessitated who we would not be, as well. The movie is about the way the shadows of those other life paths still live with us.
Possibility is also a metaphor for ADHD. When we have so many possibilities that we can not focus on a single one. Evelyn demonstrates this undiagnosed ADHD early in the movie, and the despair of choice-overload becomes a major theme at the end of the movie. (And becomes a metaphor for teenage depression.)
And lastly, possibility implies just such a big world. Can you actually hold in your mind all the possibility inherent in everything? Trying to do so will drive a tiny human brain mad.
And I don't just mean in the Everything Bagel sense that is the delightful metaphor in the film. But the film itself is... everything everywhere all at once. From the opening shot, every scene is cluttered and has too much going on. The pace never fucking stops, and in fact only accelerates constantly. The maximalism is a carefully crafted style.
(And you can tell the maximalism is intentional from the points where they contrast it, like the white curtained world where Jobu is building her bagel, or the long scene of two rocks just looking out over an austere landscape.)
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Everything else I have to say is minor, and probably obvious to people who have seen it anyway? The movie crisply takes metaphors - like the ADHD - showcases how the metaphor works, and then moves on without rubbing it down to dust.
I did appreciate how deftly it dealt with the uber-themes of chaos versus order. A meta-narrative we see in so many stories is the forces of harmony and order staving off the collapse and destruction of the system. We can call this the conservative narrative. And the alphaverse characters early on show just this justification - since Jobu Topaki, your children don't listen to you and your institutions are crumbling and your coffee tastes wrong. To preserve the harmonious order you need to kill the Outsider. And if that means killing your own children, it's because the Outsider has "infected" your children and is now a monster that lives in them. (This perspective of course, is represented by the older generation.)
All of that is bunk, but of course, many many stories tell that tale (Thor, Transformers, almost every Disney movie) and I wasn't going to be too upset if EEAAO told this narrative as well.
But no, they utterly smash that narrative. The chaos is not "in" your daughter, it is your daughter. You can not and should not kill the chaos, you need to love and embrace the chaos. You need to become the primordial chaos. (This narrative is also fairly common to be clear - remember Captain Marvel? - but this movie did an excellent representation of it, from the moment Jobu stepped off the freight elevator and showed her fighting style.)
There's so much more to say. Every character you see is revealed to have a private story of their own going on with different universes once you pay attention to them (while paying attention to everything else on the screen.) Quotidian items are littered throughout the beginning - phone calls, circular mirrors, bagels, a karaoke machine, spinning circles - that acquire heavy meaning the longer the film goes on. You will laugh and cry at the same time.
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Media this movie either references, or is so similar that if you loved that you should watch this: the Matrix, Wong Kar-Wai, Homestuck, Ratatouille, the OA, Turning Red, Crouching Tiger, James Acaster, Rick and Morty, Azathoth, Egirls, everything everywhere.
