Best Pictures Nominees 2023 Spotlight: Everything Everywhere All At Once/Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Rated R

What if you were able to see all versions of yourself, and the lives you might have led? How do we avoid regret? Is it by choosing the best of all possible choices, or by some other action to make our choices meaningful? Everything Everywhere All at Once turns these questions over and over, examining them in the context of family life and parent-child relationships.  

When their laundromat gets audited by the IRS, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) must gather documentation so that the couple can attend a sit-down meeting with agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Within the first moments of the film, we recognize that all is not going well for Evelyn: her relationship with her teenage daughter is strained. She fights with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) about the logistics of running their business; their relationship has frayed to the point that he is filing for divorce. They fight over her stern and rigid father (James Hong) who lives with them. When they arrive at the IRS office, however, the Alphaverse version of Waymond arrives to let Evelyn know that the multiverse is threatened by Jobu Tupaki, a nihilistic, multiverse-jumping being that is able to bend matter to her will; Jobu has created a black hole-like “everything bagel” that consumes, well, everything. Evelyn, Waymond and their daughter Joy go on a multiverse-jumping journey to fight back against Jobu. In the process they glimpse the lives they’ve lived, the ones they haven’t, and forge closer bonds to one another. 

At a sensory level, Everything Everywhere captures the heady, disorienting experience of being a teenager: the moment to moment whiplash of charging from one emotional extreme to another. It also captures the contradictory desire to separate from our family as individuals and at the same time to know that they accept us as we are. At the same time, it’s a portrait of adulthood: dealing with the choices we’ve made and how they have led us to where we are, and the struggle against regret as we age. It's a dizzying ride through the multiverse, incorporating impressive, absurdist action and stunt sequences (and plenty of visuals, it should be said, which are not for the faint of heart). The directing duo Daniels draw on their previous work as music video artists to make a visual experience that is quick, energetic, and entirely their own. While packed with visual interest, this movie is a bit of a Trojan horse: it wows the viewer with martial arts and takes them on a ride through sci-fi conceits, but the emotional core of the story is a family drama, examining our ties to one another and how these relationships (and the choices we make within them) are what ground us in a world that often seems chaotic. 

Banshees of Inisherin

Rated R

In film, the terrain of romantic rupture is familiar and well-trod; not so much, perhaps, the ending of a friendship. Even less so if the cause of that end is murky at best. With Banshees of Inisherin, that’s exactly where writer-director Martin McDonagh begins. The story of this film is about one half of a friendship’s desire to be done (in the character’s blunt-yet-laconic statement to the other, “[I] just don’t like you no more”), and the other half’s refusal to let go. Colm, the character initiating the break, is played by Gleeson, and he infuses the character with a grim weariness that sets up his character as a foil to Farrell’s Padraic, who is the picture of gregarious exteriority. In the process of introducing this conflict, we meet Padraic’s sister Siobhan, played by Kerry Condon. She is exasperated by their petty squabble, and by the claustrophobic life on the island generally. She fears that the banshee’s keening may soon be for her; if not physically, then psychically.

One of the central themes the characters return to is this question: Which is preferable, to be nice or interesting? Is it more worthwhile to pursue personal kindness, however impermanent, or to create something beautiful that will outlast you? In the case of Colm, he has come to believe the latter; he feels acutely that his time on earth is waning and doesn’t want to waste time on idle patter. No more afternoons talking nonsense at the pub with Padraic. He wants to spend time to himself, composing music on his violin. Colm demands freedom from Padraic’s friendship, offering an ultimatum with grisly consequences if Padraic is unable to respect his wishes. Padraic’s inability to see that his former friend will follow through on this promise, and Colm’s self-defeating determination, provide the story’s momentum. In trademark McDonagh style, the script moves with a quick, darkly comic wit, and the characters possess a tragic blindness to their own foibles. These men's behaviors, and their inability to see past themselves, move them towards ineluctable ends. 

If you are interested in checking out some of the 2023 Best Picture Nominees, take a look below for titles in our collection: