Evelyn Wang is a woman who is troubled by many things. Her laundromat is being audited by the IRS and the property may be seized. Her husband is filing for divorce. She’s estranged from her daughter. Her equally estranged father has just moved to the US to live with her. There are customers to serve, a Chinese New Year party to prepare, receipts to organize and dreams left unfulfilled.
In short, her life is a mess. And it’s about to get a whole lot messier. Because just as everything around her is falling apart and her head feels as if it’s about to explode, Evelyn learns about the existence of the multiverse – an infinite number of universes with infinite versions of ourselves. For any choice that you could have made, a universe exists where you did make that decision. And there is a being who experiences all these universes at the same time. It’s Evelyn’s daughter, Joy.
In an alternate universe, Joy was part of an experiment to explore the multiverse, and in the process she gained the ability to effortlessly hop between all the alternate versions of herself. To experience, well, Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s driven her insane, turning her into an unpredictable force of nihilism that commits random acts of chaos. Yet now, she has a goal. To find someone whom she can pass on her ability to, who can also see the infinite universes and understand what she sees as the ultimate truth: Nothing. Matters.
That person happens to be Evelyn. Whose life is a mess. Whose mind is always in multiple places at once, trying to fix everything and solving nothing. Her chaotic mind proves a perfect ground to plant the seeds of Joy’s nihilistic belief.
As Joy takes Evelyn through the multiverse, showing her all the people that she could have been, all the things she could have done, Evelyn starts to crumble. Our life makes sense if we can pinpoint what matters. But how can anything matter if everything is happening at the same time? Joy’s ultimate plan is to destroy the multiverse, and herself along with it, so that she can finally escape the endless noise that has fractured her entire being. Evelyn, her eyes opened to the utter meaningless of existence, is prepared to go along with her.
Yet an unlikely hero saves the day: Evelyn’s simple-minded husband, Waymond. Throughout the film he’s been something of a background character, playing the silly foil to the more serious-minded Evelyn, who has always felt like she’s been the more practical one in the relationship. “What would he do without me?” She often thinks disapprovingly as she watches him talk nonsense with customers and paste googly eyes on random objects (for fun). Her husband is always smiling, always seeing the good in everything while Evelyn has to deal with all of life’s problems.
But then Evelyn meets a different version of Waymond, in a universe where they never married. This Waymond is a bit more serious and mature, but his heart is still the same. He explains to her that he’s not stupid, that he sees all of life’s problems, confusions and contradictions. He just chooses to see the good.
Evelyn tells him that, had they gotten together, they would wake up every morning in a tiny apartment, above a failing laundromat, frantically doing their taxes. Upon hearing this, Waymond simply says, “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
Even in our world, where we don’t have to deal with any alternate universes, it can sometimes feel like we are being pulled in multiple directions at the same time. All our duties and responsibilities, our dreams and desires. We become worried and troubled by many things, when in fact, only one thing is needed. We just need to choose the better part. Waymond chose to focus on the people he loves. As Christians, we can choose to focus on God, who is there in every moment. Through all this cosmic noise Their Love reaches out to us across universes, waiting to be heard. It’s up to us to listen.