How Everything Everywhere All At Once opens a multiverse of opportunity for Asian filmmakers

Hayden Szeto loved Everything Everywhere All At Once so much, he couldn't recall the last time he was so excited to bring his friends to the movies — or anyone else.

"If aliens came down to Earth and were like, 'Hey, what's a movie?' I'd be like, show them that one. Show them Everything Everywhere All At Once," said the Vancouver-born actor, best known for his role in 2016's The Edge of Seventeen.

"That's a movie. Like, it encompasses everything that we want in a movie: Heart, action, acting, direction, cinematography, humour, sadness, drama, anything. It's all in one bagel."

It's the darling of the 2023 awards season: Everything Everywhere All At Once is the most nominated film at this Sunday's Oscars (11 nods), and a serious front-runner for best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor. 

But beyond the wave of accolades, the film's lightning-in-a-bottle success could also mark a watershed moment for Asian representation in Hollywood — and not just a false start, according to Asian Canadian actors, filmmakers and critics who spoke with CBC News.

Everything Everywhere tells the story of a Chinese American immigrant named Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), the co-owner of a laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). She has a tense relationship with their daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who wants mom to acknowledge and accept that she is gay. The family is saddled with bills and debt, and the couple is on the verge of divorce — crushed by the reality of the American Dream.

Then Evelyn is pulled into a fantastic multiverse where she discovers that all of existence is threatened. Only she can save it by exploring its dimensions and experiencing the alternate lives that she could have led, including that of a kung fu fighter and a movie star — but she also begins to understand her daughter's despair and her husband's feelings of neglect.

WATCH | The film's success opens a world of opportunities:

Ethan Eng, a 22-year-old Chinese-Canadian filmmaker who co-stars in his directorial debut Therapy Dogs, said that Everything Everywhere All At Once demonstrated that there isn't just a single blueprint for Asian representation in film.

"You can be good, you can be bad, you can be wild. It's a whole universe, you could say, of possibilities and I think that's what freedom of identity is," Eng said.

"What this movie has done, in terms of [showing] a scope of identity and really breaking that open and letting everybody kind of experience that on the big screen — I think it's really special."

A mile-a-minute kaleidoscope of strange characters, high-powered action sequences and silly concepts (hot dog fingers, anyone?), Everything Everywhere's success is a bizarre feat in the current industry landscape, according to Toronto-based film critic Rachel Ho.

But even with its specific, tender depiction of the Chinese American experience, people of all backgrounds have latched onto the universal message of the film, a story of wanting "other people to accept and love what you have discovered about yourself," she said.

It's not the first time that a movie with a predominantly Asian cast has prompted conversation of change in Hollywood. The 1993 film Joy Luck Club, for example, was supposed to mark a crossroads in Asian representation on screen — "and then nothing happened," Ho said.