(Credit: A24)

Nobody could have predicted that an absurdist multiverse movie with a sex toy-assisted fight sequence would end up winning the biggest prizes the industry has to offer, but that’s the majesty of Everything Everywhere All at Once in microcosm.

Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan told a moving and relatable generational family drama and soaked it in the excess of martial arts cinema, mind-bending fantasy, and surrealist comedy to create a ‘Best Picture’ winner like no other, with Michelle Yeoh in spectacular form as a matriarch who gets a lot more than she bargained for when an interdimensional rupture begins unravelling the very fabric of multiple realities.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an intensely singular film, and while there’s nothing exactly like it, there are plenty of similar films that dabble in many of the same motifs. Beyond that, there are also more than a few to evoke similar kinetic thrills in their own set pieces, so anyone who got a kick out of the genre-bending madness has plenty on tap that ticks similar boxes.

There are no movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once in the traditional sense, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t options for those seeking a fix along the same lines.

Jaw-dropping journeys of self-discovery like Everything Everywhere All at Once

It might be an action-packed epic with plenty of hand-to-hand combat, but at the end of the day, Everything Everywhere All at Once is about the journey of self-discovery undertaken by both Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang and Stephanie Hsu’s daughter Joy, with the healing of their bond key to the story.

With that in mind, there’s no better place to start than Swiss Army Man, which hails from the same writers and directors. The movie traces Paul Dano’s Hank and Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse on a dreamlike adventure of a lifetime that forces some important – and harsh – life lessons to be learned along the way.

An Oscar winner in itself, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite tackles many of the same familial sentiments as Everything Everywhere All at Once, although the Kim and Park clans are dealing with very different circumstances. Existential classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is rooted in relationship, intimacy, and loss, all major issues that plague every generation of the Wang family, making them spiritual bedfellows in a way.

Reflecting on a society-wide social sentiment, Boots Riley’s darkly hilarious Sorry to Bother You also echoes Everything Everywhere All at Once with a journey through alternate realities, shining a light on a familiar struggle for many that’s easily digestible as resonant entertainment for all. Much as Everything Everywhere All at Once leaned into Michelle Yeoh’s action hero days to inform her character, so too does Birdman with Michael Keaton’s Batman baggage, and each endures as offbeat philosophical ruminations on the intricacies of life.

Mind-bending action spectaculars like Everything Everywhere All at Once

The multiverse has become the latest plaything for the superhero genre, but it still hasn’t been done better than Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which takes the idea of alternate realities and endless variants to deliver an eye-popping crowd-pleaser not a million miles away from Everything Everywhere All at Once.

No discussion of action movies that make the audience question reality is complete without The Matrix, and the martial arts influences sit neatly in the same pile as the Daniels’ ‘Best Picture’ winner, while the same can also be said of Stephen Chow’s deranged delight Kung Fu Hustle.

In fact, if the comic book stylings of Into the Spider-Verse and the frantic fisticuffs of Kung Fu Hustle were tossed into a blender alongside the sly and self-aware genre subversions of Everything Everywhere All at Once, then the end result would look a lot like Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a feast for the eyes that plants its tongue firmly in cheek and has a whale of a time doing it.

If none of that quartet stands out as bonkers enough, then look no further than The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, one of the cultiest cult classics to ever cult classic. Peter Weller’s title hero ends up in an interdimensional war for the fate of the planet in a riotous good time that ended on a sequel-teasing note that went unfulfilled.

10 movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once:

• Swiss Army Man (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, 2016)
• Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
• Birdman (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
• Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
• Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsay, and Rodney Rothman, 2018)
• The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
• Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)
• The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (W.D. Richter, 1984)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Related Topics