Since it opened in the US last month, Everything Everywhere All At Once has emerged as one of the must-see movies of the year – receiving rave reviews from critics and fans everywhere.
The film is the latest to engage with the concept of multiverses – but does so in a very different way to recent superhero films like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, creating something wholly unique in the process.
It’s also a film that very much lives up to its title – there is a lot going on, especially towards the latter stages, and consequently, it can be a little hard to keep up.
And so to help out we’ve provided a handy explanation of the film’s ending below – complete with some exclusive insight from directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
Read on to have the Everything Everywhere All At Once ending explained.
- Everything Everywhere All At Once review: Extremely ambitious and strikingly original
Everything Everywhere All At Once ending explained
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The first thing to bear in mind is that the final sections of the movie are difficult to follow by design. The action is unfolding in various different universes simultaneously, and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) told RadioTimes.com that the most important thing is for fans to follow the emotional through-line rather than connect every single dot.
“Often when I’m watching a movie, I’m thinking about the characters, their arcs, the themes, how it’s going to connect, my brain just wants to solve the movie, which is such a disservice to the film and a disservice to you as the viewer,” Kwan said. “I’m all about analysing film after the fact, but I want to experience the art, I want to experience something transcendent and sublime, which does not come from us trying to solve it.
“And I think it’s this problem of control,” he continued. “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. 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.”
“I do think that was something that was so fun,” Scheinert added. “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.”
“I will say, though, that despite all that, we did spend a lot of time making sure that the logic was sound,” Kwan explained. “So there’s almost an explanation for everything in the film, everything connects in some way in our heads. Even if the viewer might not know or fully understand that.”
Anyway, in order to make sense of the ending, there are still a few things that it is important to know. Amongst the many parallel universes Evelyn Wang is exposed to, perhaps the most important is the Alphaverse – the first one to successfully make contact with the others, where people have developed technology that allows them to project themselves into the bodies of their parallel selves, a process known as verse-jumping.
Evelyn has specifically been recruited by the Alpha version of her husband Waymond to defeat an omniversal being called Jobu Tupaki – who we eventually learn is none other than the Alpha version of her daughter Joy, who had been forced into too many verse-jumping experiments by Alpha Evelyn and become a monster in the process.
More precisely, this particular version of Evelyn has been chosen because she appears to be the least accomplished one – she hasn’t mastered any skills to nearly the extent of her parallel selves, and because of this is judged to have more potential for verse-jumping.
Anyway, having seen every single parallel universe at once, Jobu Tupaki has become something of a nihilist, and has started a cult of people with similar views, seemingly with the intention of taking down the entire multiverse. To this end, she has created an ‘Everything Bagel’ – a powerful black hole that has the power to destroy everything.
So after battling off her various minions in various universes, Evelyn comes face to face with Jobu, who tries to win her over to her nihilist stance – even telling her that “If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.”
Initially, Evelyn appears to be convinced by this argument, and almost enters the Everything Bagel herself, but she is then saved by none other than her husband, Waymond – albeit one of the other incarnations of him – who informs her that rather than fighting with hands and weapons, sometimes it’s better to fight with empathy.
And so Evelyn changes tack: rather than fighting Jobu’s sidekicks in a traditional manner, she instead uses her multiverse knowledge to find out what is hurting each of them and put it right, before she eventually reaches her daughter.
At this point, we see Evelyn and Joy have a frank conversation about their relationship and the way in which the former had been pushing the latter. After an emotional dialogue, Evelyn explains that in some ways Jobu is correct that nothing matters– but really that means they can do anything they want, and what she wants more than anything is to spend time with her daughter.
And so they reach an agreement to move forwards, determined to be more understanding of each other and fix their relationship. We see the beginning of this new dynamic in the final, more grounded scenes, where Evelyn shows clear signs of affection towards Joy’s girlfriend Becky and Waymond.
Her adventures in the multiverse have taught her that for all the other, seemingly more exciting versions of herself and the universe, the most important things are the simple connections between her family – and showing empathy and kindness wherever possible.
Speaking of the decision to end the film with an”empathy fight”, Kwan explained to RadioTimes.com, “I think the problem came from the fact that we like action movies, we love the idea of making action movies. But we don’t think the world needs more action movies. We don’t need more movies about violence – at least not ones where violence is the answer.
“Consequently… you know, we’re always chasing contradictions, we’re always chasing the things that we can’t solve. And that was one of them was like, ‘Oh, can we make an action movie where the character is fighting them with love?
“It’s absurd, and it’s silly, but also kind of beautiful, and just as satisfying as any action movie out there. So that was one of our North Stars – if we could get there by the end of this movie, I think we will make something very unique and special. And then it was how to get there and how to earn it and how to make it give you that thrill that like a punch and a kick gives you but also how to like logically walk you through that,” Scheinert added.
“And the character of Waymond took shape as we tried to earn that finale. In a way, we discovered him along the way, this celebration of the nice person who usually gets ignored in an action movie.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once is in UK cinemas from Friday 13th May 2022. Visit our Film hub for more news, interviews and features or find something to watch now with our TV Guide.
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