Favorite Characters: Evelyn Wang (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

*Spoilers.*

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a wild, weird movie that’s bursting with love, and so many aspects of it are firing on all cylinders from start to finish. But of course, at the center of it all, in the middle of that inventive maelstrom of possibilities, is Evelyn herself.

When Evelyn (and the audience) first meets the Waymond from the Alphaverse, we learn that he’s been searching the multiverse for the Evelyn who’s able to stop the threat of Jobu Tupaki. And he thinks he’s finally found her.

She’s an unlikely candidate, to say the least. She’s a world-weary immigrant mom and struggling business owner who’s constantly stressed trying to keep everything together. In Evelyn’s mind, her flighty husband and difficult daughter add to the constant effort of her daily life. Her laundromat is being audited, and her messy, cramped apartment is full of noise and commotion. And she’s the multiverse’s best hope?

The answer lies in the Alphaverse technology of verse-jumping. Using their tech, users can access their other possible selves in different universes, temporarily borrowing their useful skills to fight against Jobu Tupaki. As Waymond explains it, every choice spawns a new universe in which that decision was made differently. And it’s actually because Evelyn’s life is so dissatisfying that she holds the key to stopping Jobu. Most people, Waymond tells her, only have a few useful alternate selves to draw from. But because she’s made so many wrong choices in her life, littering her own personal multiverse with unlived dreams, she has tons of other selves, all with different experiences/skills she can borrow.

An Evelyn who’s a kung fu expert. An Evelyn who’s an opera singer. An Evelyn who’s a teppanyaki chef, who’s blind, who never married Waymond, who’s a sign spinner, who has hot dogs for fingers. Countless Evelyns with lives far from the laundromat.

Our Evelyn envies that. When she gets her first glimpse at another universe, she longs to stay in that life, dreaming of how much better she could have had it. But ultimately, this isn’t a movie about a woman who sees what her life could have been. It’s about a woman who learns to love her own life, hectic and shabby as it is, because it’s the people that make it special. Her specific people, her sunshiny husband and vulnerable daughter, realizing she wouldn’t trade them for all the glittering possibilities out there in the multiverse.

Instead, she uses those other Evelyns and their skills to take on Jobu Tupaki, understanding in the end that it’s about reaching her rather than simply fighting her. By choosing to overload herself with rapid verse-jumping, replicating the accident that created Jobu in the first place, Evelyn is able to experience the multiverse as she does, is able to understand her. Experiencing everything, everywhere, all at once, while still keeping an important foothold in her own universe, Evelyn holds a hand out to Jobu and pulls her back from the edge. She saves the multiverse, and her daughter in the process.