Everything Everywhere All At Once is posed to be a big winner at the upcoming 2023 Academy Awards, based on how well the multiverse drama has performed at recent award shows like the Critics’ Choice Awards. The film stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American mother struggling with her laundromat business, who has to travel across time and space in order to save the multiverse. It’s an incredible complex movie all the way through, with an ending that may have left a lot of viewers puzzled. Now, as the Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert-directed film heads into the Oscars with a total of 11 nominations, including Best Picture, HollywoodLife has the full breakdown of everything that happened at the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
What Happened At The End Of ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’?
In Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn is visited by her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) from an alternate universe, known as the “Alphaverse.” He warns Evelyn that she must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to save the multiverse. While jumping through time and space, Evelyn clashes with her IRS inspector Deidre (Jamie Lee Curtis), and realizes that the big bad in all of this is Jobu Tupaki, the Alphaverse version of her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Evelyn has a rocky relationship with her daughter, who is gay, and doesn’t feel accepted by her family. Evelyn is also dealing with major marital struggles with Waymond, who wants a divorce.
So, Evelyn learns that Jobu Tupaki wants to destroy the multiverse and has created an “Everything Bagel” black hole to do it. Jobu nearly recruits Evelyn to her cause, until one of the alternate versions of Waymond convinces her she can win with kindness and love. That inspires Evelyn to use what she’s learned from multiverse jumping to find out what is hurting those around her and help them. Once she reaches her daughter, Evelyn and Joy have an emotional conversation where they reconcile, with Evelyn telling Joy that she’ll always want to be with her.
With Evelyn and Joy’s relationship healed, their regular life is restored and the multiverse battle is finally over. Evelyn and Waymond reconcile their marriage and the united family is prepared to deal with their IRS problems. Plus, Evelyn finally introduces Joy’s girlfriend Becky (Tallie Mandel) to her father Gong Gong (James Hong), proving that she does truly accept Joy. In the final scene, Evelyn and her family are talking to the IRS, when she’s briefly drawn to her alternative selves from the multiverse, but she stays in her own body in her home universe.
What Is The Message Behind ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Ending?
As complex as Everything Everywhere All At Once is, the main message behind the film is really just about the emotional ties between family. In the end, it’s love, kindness, and acceptance that helps Evelyn reconcile with her family, which saves the multiverse from being destroyed. In an interview with RadioTimes, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert explained that the bonds between the characters is the most important aspect of the film.
“The viewer wants to have control and feel like they’re smarter than the movie. And this movie was meant to rewire all of that stuff and basically, as an audience member, you either have to completely let go and just get pulled into the film, or you have a very unpleasant ride for most of the movie if you’re trying to process it all,” Kwan said. “And I think for the people who don’t like this movie, oftentimes it’s because they weren’t ever able to fully let go.”
Scheinert added, “I do think that was something that was so fun. Once we started showing rough cuts to people and they said that they just had to give up on the logic and just follow the emotion at a certain point. And then the question became, at what point do we want them to do that? Because you don’t want them to give up too early. But that’s such an exciting thing to do to an audience when that’s not the norm, when the norm is very much the opposite.”
In an interview with The Verge, the Daniels explained how their movie is a story about “generational love.” Scheinert said, “We tried to make an empathetic story about how hard it is for our parents’ generation to understand our generation. We tried not to oversimplify that idea by doing an ode to how beautiful it is when someone who grew up in a completely different way goes on the brave journey of trying to understand and support someone so different from themselves.”