Critical response
The film garnered widespread critical acclaim. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 407 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Led by an outstanding Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its title with an expertly calibrated assault on the senses." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 81 out of 100, based on 55 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by PostTrak gave it an 89% positive score, with 77% saying that they would definitely recommend it.
Critics have noted that Everything Everywhere All at Once explores themes of immigrant identity, intergenerational conflict, and cultural assimilation. The film portrays the experiences of a Chinese American immigrant family, highlighting tensions between traditional values and life in the United States, as well as communication barriers shaped by language and cultural differences.
Scholars Afarin Rajaei and Karen McKenna-Quayle argue that the film examines intergenerational trauma, conflicted identities, and the challenges faced by immigrant families navigating multiple cultural frameworks.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire called the film an "orgiastic work of slaphappy genius", praising the direction and performances, particularly Yeoh's, calling it the "greatest performance that Michelle Yeoh has ever given". The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney called it a "frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven [that] is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun", complimenting the cast and score but found the handling of the story's underlying theme underwhelming. In her review for RogerEbert.com, Marya E. Gates lauded Yeoh's performance, writing, "Yeoh is the anchor of the film, given a role that showcases her wide range of talents, from her fine martial art skills to her superb comic timing to her ability to excavate endless depths of rich human emotion, often just from a glance or a reaction." Bramesco praised the Daniels for constructing a "large, elaborate, polished, and detailed expression of a vision", Amy Nicholson of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Over its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, the movie's ambitions double, and double again, as though it's a Petri dish teeming with Mr. Kwan and Mr. Scheinert's wildest ideas."
Some reviewers called Yeoh's performance the best of her career. In her review for Vanity Fair, Maureen Ryan said, "Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve, and growing curiosity" adding that she "makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping." Adam Nayman of The Ringer referred to the film as "a love letter to Yeoh [and] extremely poignant, giving its 59-year-old star a chance to flex unexpected acting muscles while revisiting the high-flying fight choreography that made her a global icon back in the 1990s". In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jake Coyle wrote that although it "can verge on overload, it's this liberating sense of limitless possibility that the movie leaves you filled with, both in its freewheeling anything-goes playfulness and in its surprisingly tender portrait of existential despair". Tasha Robinson of Polygon named the scene of Evelyn and Joy Wang as rocks with their dialogue appearing as on-screen subtitles, all while trying to find common ground, as one of the best movie scenes of 2022, saying "… it's a perfect moment. Like so many EEAAO sequences, it turns between emotions on a dime. But the quiet of the moment is essential. Out of context, it's just an odd moment between rocks. But within the context of the film, it's a breather the audience and characters both desperately need, and the emotions are so heightened that just the sight of rock-Joy and rock-Evelyn sharing a companionable laugh is remarkably heartening and hilarious."
Armond White of National Review wrote: "Unschooled Marvel addicts who never heard of Kafka, Buñuel, or Chuck Jones easily fall for the entropy farce. The Daniels refuse narrative convention in order to represent our culture's gradual decline into disorder… The film's ultimate message: 'Be Kind', spoken by two rocks. It's a childish palliative… Yeoh brings adult stability to the blackout-skit chaos and cast of 'stupid human' clowns. But the Daniels reduce life to 'just a statistical inevitability, it's nothing special'."
Bertin Huynh wrote in The Guardian that the film "distils east Asian philosophies like no other before it" and that "its heart of Buddhist and Daoist thought is what makes Everything Everywhere truly great"; he further criticised Western reviews of the film, stating that the message of the film was "often missed by a western audience", and "wholly emblematic of Hollywood's dismissiveness of Asian achievements and stories".
Dissenting reviews include that of Richard Brody for The New Yorker, who dismissed it as a "sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie", and that of Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian who described it as "a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time".
The New York Times named the character Jobu Tupaki, played by Hsu, one of the 93 Most Stylish "People" of 2022.
