Note: There are spoilers ahead for the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once

Parallel universes. Generational trauma. A touch of dirty humour. An ageing laundromat. A Ratatouille reference, a raging, murderous psychopath, and as it should be, a lot of googly eyes. What do they all have in common? They all feature in Everything Everywhere All At Once, an adventure, action-packed absurdist comedy that spans both universes and genres. When it was released in 2022, it reached critical acclaim for its filmmaking, acting and storytelling. It clearly touched many people, myself included, and had a lot of lessons and insights I still carry with me today. But as many people, and even myself, an avid fan of the movie, have said: it's weird. It's really weird.

Everything Everywhere All At Once features an ordinary woman well into middle age, having accumulated a life of failures and regrets, grappling with her reality as she is thrust into war across the multiverse. She is confronted by people from a parallel universe and learns how to fight by tapping into her other lives in alternate universes. These are lives where she had made different choices and had reached heights of success that this version of her had not. In this life, she is a humble laundromat owner, but in others, she's a star: an actress, a chef, a martial artist. Along the way, she glimpses the lives she could have had and clashes with an alternate-universe version of her daughter who harbours nefarious plans to destroy the multiverse with the powers of the Everything Bagel.

It sounds nuts. As our protagonist is caught in this colourful maelstrom of timelines, villains and hilarious fight sequences, every preconception she had begins to unravel, and along with it her very psyche and feeling of control over her life. The main antagonist, her aforementioned daughter from an alternate universe who has gone mad from being exposed to all of the different timelines at once, shares her pain. She's just a speck of sand in a desert, just a drop of water in an ocean, and around her is a vast amount of everything that she has no way to control. And while secret gadgets and magical confetti are completely irrelevant to us, this feeling of hers is something a lot of us know all too well. With today's world only becoming more advanced, more fast-paced and more confusing by the second, its easy to feel like just specks of dirt and water being swept up in forces way bigger than us. The movie digs into this feeling. 'What's the point of anything we do?', the movie screams through a mind-bending middle act where our protagonist slowly loses her mind. What's the point of trying?

My favourite line in this movie happens when our protagonist is at an all time low. She gives in to despair and lashes out, in one universe trashing up the laundromat she's been running all these years, in another stabbing her husband with whom her marriage has become rocky. In yet another universe, where they had gone their separate ways to pursue fame and fortune, she confronts him. In Chinese, she tells him about their alternate lives, struggling with taxes in their shoddy laundromat and being on the brink of divorce. She tells him he should be glad she rejected him all those years ago. And he replies, also in Chinese, with the subtitles reading, "In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you."

Except that's not the actual line, because it's been translated. "如果有来生，我还是会选择和你一起报税、开洗衣店。" And herein lies my biggest gripe with this movie: a more accurate subtitle would read "In another life, I would have still chosen to do taxes and open a laundromat with you". It deeply resonated with me. In this life, he had wealth, status, and fame, things most spend their whole lives chasing. Yet he would have given it all up for an ordinary and mundane life with her.

It's this quiet, simple love that gets through to our protagonist and gives her, and by extension us the audience, this movie's answer. What really matters, in a world of insignificant and ephemeral nothings like ourselves? Why even bother, in a world too vast and out of our control? In a whirlwind of uncertainty and chaos, it's the little things that ground us. In a heartwarming montage, she reflects on how her husband always viewed life with joy and whimsy: playing games with his daughter, sharing jokes with customers, and most importantly, putting googly eyes on the laundry bags. In this life where we are so often powerless and so often made to keep rolling with the punches, we can use the little power we have to make the smallest kindness. As her husband says, "The only thing I do know...... is that we have to be kind. Please. Be kind...... especially when we don't know what's going on."

It's a valuable mindset to bring into our own dull, normal, transient and insignificant lives. When we put in the effort to put our own meaning into our everyday lives, ourselves and the little good things we surround ourselves with, be it friends, family, hobbies or our community, develop their own sort of significance. With patience and kindness, we can establish a haven, our own little world tucked away in the web of multiverses.