Relationship Spotlight: Evelyn & Joy Wang (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

*Spoilers.*

As with most aspects of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the relationship between Evelyn and her daughter Joy is both enormously expansive and intimately specific. Because of the multiversal premise, it’s about Evelyn’s relationship with multiple Joys, even as it’s about just one. Watching it unfold over the course of the film is as uncomfortably grounded as it is mindbendingly twisty.

When we’re introduced to Evelyn and Joy, we haven’t heard their story before, but we’ve definitely heard their type of story before. Immigrant mother and her American daughter are unable to connect—Evelyn tends to express her love through “helpful” criticism,” and she brushes it off when called out on it. Joy isn’t as successful as Evelyn would like, and her disappointment has a tinge of “after everything we’ve sacrificed to give you a better life.” At the start of the film, Joy is nervously psyching herself up to introduce her girlfriend to her grandfather, a plan that Evelyn repeatedly tries to steer her away from.

Of course, when Evelyn realizes she’s the only one who can save the multiverse from the villainous Jobu Tupaki, things get a lot less unconventional, and that’s multiplied by a zillion when she discovers that Jobu is Joy. In the Alpha universe, Evelyn was the scientist who pioneered verse-jumping technology, and she pushed her daughter further and further into the multiverse until it broke her. Jobu experiences every Joy in every universe simultaneously, and she flits between universes as easily as you or I might blink. She has a creation that threatens to destroy everything—oh yeah, and she’s been traveling the multiverse killing every Evelyn she finds.

At first, Evelyn sees Jobu Tupaki as a villain who’s taken over the body of her Joy. She entreats Jobu to leave Joy alone, and when a verse-jumped version of her father urges Evelyn to kill Joy, killing Jobu in the process, Evelyn refuses. She decides that the only way to defeat Jobu is to become like her, and she proceeds to verse-jump into more and more versions of herself in the hopes of gaining similar powers.

Over the course of all this, the two of them make a discovery: while it’s true that Jobu Tupaki has been killing Evelyns, that hasn’t technically been her goal. Rather, she’s been searching the multiverse for someone who can understand her and her infinite existence, someone who can meet her at her level. And everywhere she goes, she searches for that someone in her mom.

Given that Alpha Evelyn, Jobu Tupaki’s actual mother, is the one who unwittingly created her, it might make sense for Jobu to hate Evelyn and want revenge on every version of the person who made her feel so alone in the multiverse. Some part of Jobu probably thinks that’s what she is doing, but in every universe, she’s trying to connect with her mother. And when she can’t, her rage and power take over, and she leaves destruction in her wake.

Evelyn understanding this is the key to saving the multiverse. Despite everything she’s done, Jobu Tupaki is Joy, Evelyn’s Joy and every other Joy in the multiverse, and Evelyn doesn’t have to defeat her. She has to save her. She has to love her daughter, accept her daughter, argue with her daughter that both of them have to try to be better. When Jobu is on the brink of stepping into the black hole that she herself created, Evelyn pulls her out.

In the parking lot of the laundromat, Evelyn confronts her daughter, confronts Joy, fights Jobu Tupaki’s nihilism by loving her. She reminds Joy/Jobu, “You still went looking for me through all of this noise.” And she tells her, “No matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”

At this point, Evelyn and Jobu Tupaki are the most powerful beings in the multiverse. They can be anywhere, do anything. But like Waymond says to Evelyn in the kung fu universe, they both choose a life of “laundry and taxes” together in one small, dull universe. It isn’t much, but love is growing between them there, and that makes it the only universe they need.