'Everything Everywhere All at Once' fights back against the vibe shift

By Jake Skubish

In February The Cut published a viral article by Allison P. Davis titled “A vibe shift is coming. Will any of us survive it?” The piece sought to describe an ethereal change in the way things feel, to give language to why existence right now feels so damn strange. “Something has shifted,” Davis wrote. “Our aesthetic and behavior are ... shaped by a sense of doom.”

Davis’ article focuses mostly on a cultural shift but also reckons with how a sense of unease has percolated into daily life. It’s something I immediately understood even if I haven’t been able to quite pinpoint what it is, which is why I think the concept resonated with so many people. In 2019, a trip to the grocery store was a trip to the grocery store. In 2022, I stand in the grocery store and think, “What are we doing here?”

This same imperceptible alteration in aura underpins the action in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a frenetic, multiverse-jumping kung fu epic from Daniels (the self-given title of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn Wang, a laundry store owner who finds herself given access to technology allowing her to jump between infinite alternative universes containing different versions of herself. This timeline exploration is not frivolous: She is brought into the multiverse by an alternate version of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who tells Evelyn she plays a key role in stopping an amorphous evil force wreaking havoc on the multiverse. In describing the situation to Evelyn, Waymond employs the language of the vibe shift. “You’ve been feeling it too,” he tells her. “Something is off.”

That Everything Everywhere All at Once has become a phenomenon in its own right (the film very quickly became the highest rated movie of all time on Letterboxd) speaks to how widely this recognition of the vibe shift is resonating. Daniels manage to craft a cinematic experience encapsulating the information overload defining the internet age without ever losing narrative clarity. The film combines philosophically playfulness à la The Matrix — plumbing the concepts of path dependency and probability theory — with pop culture references and unabashed silliness. One joke in particular, involving a riff on a beloved Pixar character, delightfully melds these seemingly dissimilar tones into elevated moments that are both intellectually curious and absurdly hilarious.

The question of the movie is ultimately how we should go about fighting against the sense of despair that pervades modern life. Everything Everywhere All at Once is very much a movie about the sadness fueled by the internet, how when you can see all the inevitable outcomes of the world laid out before you it seems obvious that nothing really matters. When existence appears to be a “lifetime of fractured moments,” as one character laments, then giving up feels like power.

The movie also examines the generational divide in this understanding of the world. In some ways, Daniels’ approach to this concept is patronizing; there is an element of literally saving Gen Z from themselves in the climax of the film. But Daniels are also deeply empathetic storytellers, keenly aware that the nefarious forces of the world are sometimes just calling out for help.

Daniels’ aesthetic is proudly earnest, and it’s no surprise that the film spurns doom and gloom for an appeal to kindness in the face of chaos. It’s a heartfelt response that is also disappointingly on the nose in a film that is often exhilarating in its unconventionality. Everything Everywhere All at Once hits a broad and unfocused lull in the second act, and I found myself more in awe of its ambitiousness than I was fully invested in the emotional arc of the film.

That was all true until a grand coda hit me out of nowhere, and I left adoring the unique voice of Daniels (and marveling at a powerhouse performance from Yeoh). The film pivots from an obvious appeal to goodness to something more transcendent, a reverence for some undeniable, eternal impulse toward love and connection. And for a movie that mostly takes place inside a laundromat and an IRS office, Daniels somehow make it all feel like a genuine, multiverse-spanning epic. In the sweeping finale, images of people with hot dogs for fingers become poignant reflections on persistence and optimism in a challenging world, illustrating just how successfully Everything Everywhere All at Once grounds its celebration of weirdness in emotional wisdom.

In March Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrote an article for BuzzFeed News responding to The Cut’s prognosis of a vibe shift, titled “What you’re feeling isn’t a vibe shift. It’s permanent change.” Abdelmahmoud suggests that the shift in how we are perceiving the world is more than just an aesthetic change, but downstream of larger world historical forces: environmental apocalypse, political instability, a global health crisis. “The world as we knew it is not coming back, and it’s entirely reasonable that we may find ourselves plagued with a general restlessness, a vague notion of disorder,” he writes. He evokes the exact same language Waymond uses in Everything Everywhere All at Once, writing about the “general notion that something is off.”

The reason I think Everything Everywhere All at Once will endure is because it addresses both possibilities, that the change we are experiencing is just a fluctuation of modern conditions or that it is a fundamental alteration of human life. Daniels imbue the film with an awareness of the culture of the moment without constraining it to be a commentary on 21st century consciousness. Something is particularly off now, but maybe something has always been off; life is inherently weird, and the greatest joy of Daniels’ work is their embrace of that weirdness in the face of calamity. Even if nothing matters, Everything Everywhere All at Once makes the case that we will always want to be here with each other anyway.