Past Lives gives snapshots of its protagonists in three different decades within a two-hour time frame. It begins when its star-crossed would-be lovers are just 12 years old; jumps ahead 12 years to their 24-year-old iterations when they share a screen but are thousands of miles apart; then jumps ahead by another 12 years, when everything about the protagonists’ relationship is condensed into a few days as they share the same physical space, New York City. The time in which the characters are in the same place is relatively short, yet its intensity belies how much they have also occupied one another’s mental space, albeit in perhaps different ways. It is from this collision that the story unspools into one of many possible threads.
The tension, expectation, imagination, longing, wonder, and comfort of decades of picturing an alternate reality couched in familiarity and recognition are boiled down and distilled in the space of the few days that Hae Sung is in New York, in the flesh, reckoning fantasy with reality. This section of the film is saturated with the bittersweet sense of loss for something that never was but always could have been. Nora’s emotional breakdown in the film’s closing moments is a release of the accumulation of disappointment and disillusionment—the whiplash of being pulled back and forth between possible lives. Wrapped up in the complex dynamics of her relationships with these two very different men and the very different lives they represent are delicate questions of identity. The film’s key theme is thus twofold: love and identity, both delicately bound up with—and bound with one another by—chance.
Nora is the film’s key storyteller. But Nora is not her original name—she was born in Korea and spent her first dozen years growing up amongst the hustle and concrete of Seoul. When she is 12, her family uproots for a new life in Canada, and Nora re-christens herself with an Anglicized name to facilitate her transition. Her last name, Moon, remains unchanged, and it is an appropriate one for the life she comes to have and her star-crossed fate. Fate is a concept Nora herself dismisses, but Past Lives nevertheless alludes to Buddhism at various points, including in its title. The film orbits around Nora, as do the only other characters who feature meaningfully, Hae Sung and Arthur. Hae Sung is her childhood sweetheart from Seoul, a boy she passes afternoons crying in front of who becomes a representation not only of her childhood but also the life she would have (may have) lived had her family not left Korea. Arthur is the man she ends up with. Both men are equally good. Both men appear equally eager to love Nora.
As the film illustrates, life mutates and adapts as it must, and love can grow in many places. By Arthur’s own description, the stages of his and Nora’s relationship seem to have evolved largely by chance. Nora’s ambitions bring her to New York, a city synonymous with the American Dream and which is framed as a kind of endpoint for her as an artist. She and Arthur meet at a writer’s retreat; cohabit because, hey, New York is expensive; and marry because Nora needs a Green Card to be able to stay in the States. Nora points out that while this is all true, Arthur’s version of their love story omits the love part. Whether the more circumstantial elements of their relationship are an indication of its fragility and happenstance is irrelevant. These things happened, and while they unfolded, Nora and Arthur began to love each other and continue to do so up to the present.
There is a hardness, a pragmatism to Nora that is perhaps the result of her uprooting as well as her ambition. When Arthur bewails the lack of romanticism in their story as a couple and if he is enough for the grand vision propelling Nora’s “family’s immigrant dream,” Nora’s response is simple, concise, almost laconic: “This is where I ended up. This is where I’m supposed to be.” She and Arthur married early for bureaucratic reasons. Her expediency in this regard is consistent with the young girl in Seoul who asserted that she was leaving Korea to pursue her literary ambitions, and her realism contrasts with the dreamier, more earnest and idealistic Hae Sung, who has likely wiled away the decades with a particular vision of Nora tucked safely in his imagination.
Nora’s internal conflict pulls her from one side back to Hae Sung, into a past life that is impossible to reclaim, and on the other side forward to Arthur, into a future life that is unfolding in countless ways that she cannot anticipate. The forward momentum of this life is driven by external forces like immigration law and professional opportunities—Nora’s reality is conditioned by forces she does not control. The life she imagines with Hae Sung, where her identity is not split in two, appears comforting with its well-defined, culturally clear-cut borders.
Nora fixates on Hae Sung’s “Koreanness,” the ways in which he is distinctively separate from her as a result of growing up in a different place with a different language, academic system, work culture, and so on. His style is Korean, his looks Korean, his views Korean—even his masculinity is coded as Korean. Culture imbues every aspect of his personhood. In one way this attracts Nora; in another way it alienates her. She is at once a part of that culture as a one-time participant in it but also separate from it, with physical and mental distance giving her the perspective necessary to recognize it as a construct, something that shapes the individual from the outside until it becomes so inseparable from their identity that even their thoughts and the way they move are molded by it.
In one of the first scenes of the film, the young Nora (at this point still known as Na Young) and her sister, still in Korea, announce to their parents that they will now be known as Michelle and Mary. New names, new lives. This exchange is entirely natural within the context, but it is also profoundly reflective of the identity construction process. The young Nora/Na Young has the relatively unusual opportunity to play a part in the remaking of her identity.
Most of us are not participants in one of the most very basic components of who we are—our names. These are chosen on our behalf, with the reasoning behind those choices being entirely dependent on the subjective desires, opinions, and backgrounds of the person/people choosing. Names are fundamental means of passing identity on, of intergenerational transmission of symbols, values, language. One might be named for another person in honor of them or the hope that the baby will grow up to be like their namesake.
Hae Sung’s total immersion in Korean culture (from Nora’s perspective) therefore also presents a limitation. Culture places restrictions on the way we feel we can behave, the choices we feel are available to us, the people we can be. It is something that is passed down, imposed. Nora’s family leaves Korea to escape being circumscribed by culture (as Na Young/Nora announces to her classmates, she is leaving Korea “because Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize in Literature”).
Cultures also unite and separate us through customs and languages, creating a sense of belonging or exclusion. After Arthur reveals that Nora speaks Korean when she sleeps, lamenting that Nora dreams in a language inaccessible to him, Nora responds that she is probably “just saying gibberish.”
The ways in which we experience being a particular thing are necessarily individual and incommunicable.
Whether Nora is actually saying anything meaningful in her sleep does not matter; what is important is that there will always be parts of Nora that Arthur cannot know (and vice versa, and omni versa), regardless of language or any other factors. Our identities, with their infinite facets and constant changeability, are unique to each of us. We can stick labels on ourselves and each other, but the ways in which we experience being a particular thing—such as a nationality—are necessarily individual and incommunicable. Some experiences may be shared, but others will always be personal, and even shared experiences might be lived in wildly different ways.
The effects of this can be isolating. The language Nora uses when she sleep-talks—be it English, Korean, or some hybrid language of her own—makes no difference. What she knows only she can truly understand anyway. What’s more, Nora is a hybrid, caught in the still-more-isolating limbo of a double-barreled identity. The passing snippets mentioning her work as a writer all relate to questions of identity, to ideas of passages, crossings, journeys, and sacrifices. In one scene of an audition for a play Nora has written, the actor reads a monologue about the cost of coming to a performance, comparing the price her listener has paid for the ticket, transport, and time with the sacrifice the speaker has made in crossing an ocean to be in the same place: “Some crossings cost more than others. Some crossings you pay for with your whole life.”
As a writer, Nora’s themes of journeys, loss, and identity are her attempt to convey what is otherwise impossible to articulate—her own experience. The film uses visual language to underscore this separation through its fixation on the characters’ positioning and the space separating them from one another. They linger in these moments, and the spaces seem to widen into gulfs. These tableaux capture them as they work, in isolation, through their emotions, emphasizing the singularity of experience.
Nora’s own journey has cost her a life with Hae Sung, and this trauma remains planted in her subconscious, to be worked through over and over through her writing. At the same time, she questions what that life really means, what Hae Sung’s link to a certain part of her identity is now after so much time has passed, her culture and language have changed, and so much of life has been lived. Nora’s sense of loss is as much for her relationship with Hae Sung as all he represents as a surrogate for Korea and Korean identity. He holds the “little girl” Nora “left behind,” a self that existed once but is now irretrievable.
As children Nora/Na Young and Hae Sung dart around the statues of a park. They each perch in the gaps of two heads gazing at one another, molded from the same stone and shaped in the image of one another, but with distinct differences. This is Il-Ho Lee’s New Gaze at Being, a surrealist 1994 sculpture. The statues’ features are asymmetrical, and there are gaps in the stone filled in instead by the landscape, just as Nora’s/Na Young’s and Hae Sung’s views of one another and themselves will be by time and distance and life. But the statues’ gaze is solid, reciprocal, connected by a single block of stone. Their sight of one another remains unbroken.
Diving is a form of meditation. For those who have spent time underwater, there is no need to explain the calm that it brings. The distortion of sound, the absence of the usual constraints gravity places on movement, the rhythmic push and pull of the water, and the variations in light all make the underwater world a place in which we can distill that corner of ourselves that is still—despite everything—capable of awe.
Laura McGann’s documentary The Deepest Breath captures these elements as best as any film can to attempt to convey them to those who have never had the privilege of diving. The wide-angle shots of freedivers—with arresting cinematography as they slice through the water to accomplish super-human feats—illustrate both the primal beauty as well as the terror of exploring the ocean in this way. Against the melodic soundtrack by Nainita Desai, one can almost feel the embrace of the water as the notes drop away into the abyss. The vastness of the blue around these lone freedivers is breathtaking.
The film centers around two main figures, cutting between their stories before their lives intersect by building out their biographies through a mixture of interviews and family and personal photos and videos. The first of these figures is world-renowned freediving champion Alessia Zecchini. The second is beloved top safety diver Stephen Keenan.
Keenan, a hero in the documentary’s narrative, at one point describes diving as extremely psychological. As a diver myself (albeit scuba, though the principle remains the same), I couldn’t agree more. Slipping beneath the water means renouncing recourse to the usual means of existing as a human. Everything slows down; your control of your movements becomes subject to new forces, and your control of the environment around you is virtually non-existent. You learn to act and react methodically. You learn to breathe carefully and intentionally. You learn to focus on the most basic signals to ensure your survival. The Deepest Breath depicts just how alone you are when beneath the surface, even if others are around you. In the underwater world, you retreat into your own mind, and you must either become prisoner or master of it.
There is something that is at once alluring about the open water and also inherently repellent to us as humans. Water holds a power that we envy, even as we recognize that it is far too great for us to control. Because of this, the depths beckon us with their beauty and mystery, yet they also terrify us. Perhaps this is why the idea of the siren and her song—wafting into our ears over the sound of the waves—continues to pattern our stories and imagery of the sea. Here in the film, freedivers wend their way through the water with monofins, like mermaids. In their harmonization with the sea, they become something beyond human, almost mythical.
In a way, this seems to be just what Zecchini is searching for. She yearns to be the best freediver in the world, to match and surpass her idol, Russian freediver Natalia Molchanova. Even as a child she knew “vorrei diventare un’apneista famosa” (“I want to become a famous freediver”): she is seeking not just the satisfaction of being great in her field, but also notoriety, recognition, the status of a legend.
Keenan, for his part, is depicted as having spent much of his life searching. Unlike Zecchini’s pursuit of a specific, measurable (meter by meter) goal, Keenan’s search doesn’t have a defined final destination—but he seemed determined to enjoy the journey. Through video footage Keenan recorded of his travels through Africa as a young man, he is presented as a jovial, curious, adventurous, and courageous person with a zest for living life to the fullest.
While he is shown having moments where he questioned what the purpose of this journey was, his drive to scale mountains and trek deep into the underbellies of jungles reflect that he, too, wanted from his life something that transcends, something extraordinary. As his father says, Keenan was someone who sought to “drink up every last drop of the world.” After years of wandering, Keenan finally encountered freediving. When he then paired it with safety diving, he put himself in a position to do extraordinary things, to perform acts of heroism that could be the stuff of legends—and he did.
The film’s insistence on retracing the steps Zecchini took to earn her place among the world’s greatest freedivers underscores the dedication and training it has taken, but it also tragically reveals just how much she—and others—must sacrifice in pursuit of her dream. It is because Zecchini aspires to not only achieve what Molchanova has achieved but to go even further that she decides to take on the deadly challenge of the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt. This aspiration costs the life of a man who was one of the world’s foremost safety divers, a dear friend to people from around the globe, and quite possibly the love of Zecchini’s life.
Was it worth it?
This isn’t a question the film really seems intent on asking, and for good reason. This is a story about dreams. Our first introduction to Zecchini is through the words of a childhood essay where she asks, “Ti capita di pensare che il mondo intorno a te—i compagni, gli amici, i genitori—non capiscano i tuoi sogni?” (Do you ever think that the people around you—your classmates, your friends, your parents—don’t understand your dreams?”). Chasing dreams is the purpose of both her and Keenan’s stories.
Up to this point, so much has been done to demonstrate that Keenan’s dream was to live a life that meant something to him, even if he wasn’t always certain what that meaning would be or how to reach it. In so doing, he lived a life that came to mean a great deal to a great number of other people. When he met and fell in love with Zecchini, that meaning became clear to him. We know this because his final act was saving her life. Keenan allowed her to survive what would have otherwise been a fatal dive so that she could go on to live her dream of being the greatest freediver in the world.
His dream was realized.
And because of that, Zecchini’s has been, too. Since Keenan’s death in 2017, Zecchini has gone on to break more records and win more gold medals. She is widely regarded as among the best freedivers of all time—and she is, at the time of writing, only 31 years old. As The Deepest Breath notes at its close, she dedicates all of her victories—each transcending the boundaries of what was believed to be the limits of the possible—to Keenan.
If that isn’t extraordinary, I don’t know what is.
Sex and the City, adapted from the book by Candace Bushnell and produced by HBO and Darren Star Productions, has undergone several revivals since the show ended in 2004 following six seasons. Premiering in 1998, the series was quintessential primetime fare in the days before streaming and so much content that just picking something to watch is an activity in itself. Now that the 20-year anniversary of its finale is looming, it feels appropriate to touch on some of what made the show the massive success it was and still is.
The premise of the show is a relatively simple one: four single women in the big city. From the vantage point of today’s wealth of content and constant drive to bulldoze barriers, it could be easy to miss what made Sex and the City so scandalous. For its time—and given the strict regulations for what could be aired on publicly broadcast television—Sex and the City was far more provocative than what was usually available. It managed to get away with this because HBO, its production company and a private subscription network, was not subject to the same stringent US Federal Communications Commission vetting procedure as regular channels.
In fact, Sex and the City in many ways set precedents for the type of rule-breaking that streaming services regularly engage in today. Nudity is fairly frequent, unbashful, and not always sexy (e.g., shots of Samantha’s breasts in the doctor’s office, or scenes of Charlotte’s husband Harry scampering around the house buck-naked; both season 6, episodes 14 and 9, respectively). The show is about, well, sex, and so it follows that much of the nudity derives from scenes related to this, but including scenes of nudity as it occurs in regular life as well is a way of normalizing the body and underlining that its role (exposure) isn’t purely sexual.
Vitally, nudity is not strictly female, with men’s bodies also being put on display. In an industry where female leads are “four times more likely to be shown naked than their male counterparts” according to an analysis from 2019, this is a big deal. Sex and the City even had the, ahem, balls to include full-frontal male nudity (as Samantha and her beau Richard jump into a rooftop pool, S4E13). For an American program from the Y2K era, putting this type of attention onto male bodies was rare. Today’s series apparently abound with penises, but that just wasn’t the case in the Sex and the City mediascape.
Aside from the visual boundary-pushing, Sex and the City also never shied away from conversation topics that were scandalous for their openness. To hear such brazen sexual sharing—the equivalent of men’s locker room talk—coming out of women’s mouths, for women’s thoughts and experiences to be articulated with such zest, humor, and honesty from women themselves, wasn’t normal. The dialogue of Samantha, the most sexually open of the characters, is an almost constant stream of raunchy remarks, but all four of the characters share intimate details of their sex lives, including complaints, insecurities, and confusions. By vocalizing thoughts that, at the societal level, were not considered appropriate for ladies to even have, let alone discuss, the show created a space for this type of dialogue for those who may not have had the social connections to explore these subjects.
And this leads to the key contribution of the series. The show’s title, Sex and the City, on its surface says everything about it: it is about sex and relationships in New York. But underneath that, the show is about being a woman in the world, and the way it explores this is through these women’s lives and their relationships with one another. They laugh, they cry, they fight, and they stay. The men of the series come and go. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are constant, and the structure of each episode is built around the four of them, dipping in and out of the happenings of their individual lives and coming together around their weekly meals and nights out. More than once, Carrie describes Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha as her family.
Carrie’s column, which serves as the backbone of each episode, is usually inspired by the chats she has with her girlfriends, even as its theme is romantic relationships. Each woman brings something novel to the conversation. While it would be easy to box each character into a stereotype (Charlotte as the “Upper East Side Princess,” Miranda as the frigid lawyer, etc.), the women are layered and face struggles that showcase their flaws and inconsistencies as well as their growth. They change in response to the events of the series and the other characters. They feel real.
All of this is not to say that the show itself is without flaws. There are lots of criticisms that it would be fair to level at Sex and the City (and, not having seen any of the follow-ups, I imagine the creators will have tried to address some of them). The show was still in the nascent days of political correctness and has numerous instances of offensive representations of various demographics, though this, sadly, isn’t an anomaly for media of that time. Although the characters are dynamic like real people, their degree of privilege is something that most of us can’t even dream of attaining (and some may not want to). Carrie’s life is a revolving door of designer shoes and $20 cocktails.
The only time she ever seems to work each week is for a few hours in front of her computer with a dish of takeout. Miranda is a workaholic but also an Ivy League graduate and partner in a law firm, while Samantha is head of her own highly successful PR company. Charlotte comes from old money, marries rich, divorces well, and marries rich again. The series never attempts to broach the realities of life in New York City for everyone else.
Yet Carrie’s selfishness and lack of self-awareness is something that the show is aware of, putting them into full view through her interactions with people outside her social circle (see, e.g., her bid for a loan and then, eek, having to take the bus, S4E16, or her management of being mugged, S3E17). The show’s opening sequence pokes fun at this exact point: Carrie, pretty in pink with a tutu-like skirt against a sea of somber, suited New Yorkers, struts along the city sidewalk looking pleased with herself and her little world and judgmental of what she sees beyond it. Then, she is whipped back into reality—that is, that she is part of the world, too—by a spray of dirty water from a passing bus (with an ad for her column on its side).
The series’ focus on the specifics of these characters and the trials and tribulations of their relationships doesn’t seem to attempt to portray their lives themselves as aspirational but rather their friendships with one another. These are women who support and admire each other. Moreover, their willingness to debate and challenge societal expectations of what they should look for in a partner and how they should behave is consistently presented positively. In life and in love (to borrow from Carrie), they are allowed to try, and they are allowed to fail.
What more can a show do for its characters, and what more can we do for our friends?
It was an ambitious venture to try creating a new dinosaur-themed film unrelated to the gatekeeping behemoth that is the Jurassic Park franchise, which has monopolized the dinosaur flick since the first Jurassic Park film basically founded the genre in 1993. Writer-director duo Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were obviously aware of the dangers of crossing too closely into Jurassic Park territory and instead infuse this film with the tropes and aesthetics of space and horror films. Yet there is something (actually, several things) about the result that just does not work. This raises an interesting question: to what extent is it necessary to adhere to the viewer’s expectations of how a genre film—in this case a dinosaur film—should look and feel in order to make the film successful?
65 has an opening crawl reminiscent of Star Wars; this is just about all the context that is given regarding the premise of the film besides a few throwaway lines about a third of the way through. In essence, Mills (Adam Driver) is a spaceship pilot who undertakes a two-year exploratory mission to pay the medical expenses of his sick daughter. One day while Mills is sleeping, the ship encounters an asteroid belt (whoops) that bangs it up and causes it to crash-land. In the process, the ship breaks in half, and the bevvy of pods holding (one would have assumed) scientists in a cryogenic sleep tumble out, killing everyone. Mills, lucky devil, survives with nothing more than a cut to his abdomen, which evidently is very painful but—by some unexplained miracle—does nothing to limit his freedom of movement over the days to come. Obviously, Mills is no mere man, because he makes a similarly instant recovery later when he dislocates his shoulder after tumbling 20-some feet and then immediately takes down a herd of bloodthirsty dinosaurs with underbites.
Anyway, Mills resigns himself to dying on this strange planet, but he changes heart when he discovers that there is a 9-year-old girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) who has survived the crash with him, and he needs to get her home. Their relationship is rocky at first because otherwise viewers would get bored and there needs to be some semblance of character development over the course of the film. Indeed, Koa goes from being an animal-loving child who risks her life to pull a baby dino out of some tar to a fearless warrior who stabs a T-Rex in the eye with a tooth by the end of the movie. Pretty impressive for a 9-year-old.
In the backdrop of all of this, the literally Earth-shattering meteor destined to wipe the dinosaurs out is about to hit the planet (“Catastrophic event detected,” Mills’ scanner tells him with monotone robotic concern). So, if being eaten by dinosaurs weren’t enough of a plotline, Wiles and Koa also face being vaporized due to a meteor strike.
Mills and Koa have little communication because Koa does not speak English, which places significant limitations on the exposition of how what is happening is possible. The choice to limit dialogue in this way can in the best-case scenario be viewed as an effort to explore other means of characterization and storytelling; in the worst-case, it is simply lazy filmmaking. I suspect the latter. The directors probably realize that Koa’s presence on the spaceship makes no sense, so they—and, by extension, their characters—just choose not to address it.
Besides the pitfalls of the screenplay itself, the dinosaurs in this film are distinctively slimy, crawly, and creepy. While the special effects are in and of themselves up to scratch with what viewers expect from CGI, the choice to portray the dinosaurs in this way makes them seem more alien than animal. They have sinuous movements which are noticeably different than the jerkier, almost spasmodic approach taken in the Jurassic Park films that was presumably informed by an interpretation of dinosaurs based on their modern-day descendants, birds. Their skin is viscous, which also does not seem scientifically accurate—another element that the Jurassic Park films have generally tried to honor—but is pretty gross to watch.
Scientific or historical accuracy are far from obligatory in filmmaking and are likely more often the exception rather than the rule. Still, the aesthetics of the dinosaurs in 65 are disorienting because they stray so far into the monstrous and alien. This does not really matter for a film that pretty clearly seeks to keep its audience’s attention through loud bangs and jump scares rather than engaging storytelling, but it is one more reason that 65 fails to secure a place in the dinosaur film canon dominated by Jurassic Park, which does a lot more work on the narrative level (albeit in some of its films more than others).
Of course, the Jurassic Park movies are not the only dinosaur movies that exist. A few obvious alternatives come to mind, such as any of the number of animated children’s films featuring smiley talking dinos (I’m looking at you, Land Before Time) to the more rustic depiction in the loincloth-laden One Million Years B.C. Dinosaurs also make an important appearance in the various iterations of another big franchise, King Kong, not to mention whatever Godzilla is supposed to be. Still, the fact remains that Jurassic Park has become the cornerstone of the genre. There have not really been any other films that have even tried to chomp their way into its territory.
On a personal note, I was painfully disappointed by 65 not because it is different than Jurassic Park but because it is just a badly written film. I was actually very excited that a non-Jurassic–Park dino flick was coming out; like any good 90s kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I consumed a steady diet of dinosaur content that included not only Jurassic Park and Land Before Time but also Walking with Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Planet, and the Dinosaurs TV series. Heck, I even begged for the dinosaur egg Quaker oats for breakfast and had a stegosaurus piggy bank.
In other words, I am game for anything prehistoric and am predisposed to be into it because of nostalgia.
Still, the influence of Jurassic Park in particular on what we as viewers expect to see when we buckle in for a dinosaur adventure cannot be underestimated. Generic conventions have been crafted, honed, and reinforced by each successive film in the series: from the way the dinosaurs look and move—which, though evolving over the course of the 30-year franchise in accordance with both new knowledge and technology, has remained consistent—to the (waning?) intelligence of the plotlines that raise timely questions about the implications of scientific progress. The franchise has molded each aspect of the genre, so a film that only somewhat follows that formula runs a big risk of failing to satisfy what viewers are interested in seeing.
That is not to say that filmmakers should not be trying to break the Jurassic Park mold; it is just that any film that attempts to do this needs to be so well done that it awakens a new sensibility and desire for a different type of story. 65, alas, does not achieve this.
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is a unique film in several ways. The first is its juxtaposition of outlandish humor with sudden bursts of senseless violence. The second is its naturalistic script, paired with a highly naturalist cinematic style. The third is its purity of themes. The principle theme of the film is loneliness; loneliness is how the film starts, what it builds, and where it ends. Nested within this theme are subthemes so perfectly cradled within the gaping immensity of the feeling—the certainty—of loneliness that they cannot stand as themes on their own.
McDonagh is painterly in his approach. He treats the film as a canvas, and the condition of loneliness is layered onto it with plays of light; the curves of clouds that reach across the sky and fall away; the lines of habitations that suggest a yearning for permanence but that are nonetheless of the earth and shall return to the earth; the music of voices that sound and become silent. It begins with the cinematography, which centers around wide-angle long shots of the breathtakingly beautiful but desolate island of Inisherin. A rocky mass of sand and earth and rock tossed to the side of the Irish mainland, the island is lush and green but also misty and harsh. The inhabitants traverse the open spaces of their land as scarecrows against the backdrop of sea and sky. The verdant fields are meticulously separated by stone barriers. Each inhabitant has their territory, and while the business of one is the business of all for the gossips of the island, everyone must return to their own plot to remain behind their own closed doors each night.
The premise of the film is a ruptured friendship between Padraic (Colin Farrell) and his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson). Literally overnight, Colm decides he “just doesn’t like” Padraic anymore and cannot be put upon to be his friend any longer. This sudden loss of his best friend sends Padraic into an increasingly desperate plight to regain Colm’s companionship—and Colm’s increasingly drastic counterefforts to keep Padraic away.
Colm explains his reasons to Padraic one night down the pub: aside from finding Padraic dull, he is concerned that his life is dwindling away and will soon end with no fanfare nor any lasting imprint on history. Who will remember him, or anyone else on Inisherin? No one. Their lives are comprised of nothing more than them “aimlessly chatting,” with any meaning to their words washed away against the roar of the Atlantic’s waves. Colm wants to spend his final years dedicating himself to his music, composing new songs with his fiddle so that he may contribute to—and be remembered by—posterity.
None of this makes any sense to Padraic, who maintains that “good, normal chatter” is healthy and gives their days a familiar shape. Though Padraic does not articulate it in this way, something in him knows, instinctively, that it is this shape that wards against the loneliness. Friendship, then, is another sort of scarecrow.
Padraic’s friendship can do nothing to ward away the existential loneliness of life—particularly a life unremembered.
For her part, Siobhan is driven to her wit’s end by the extremity of life on Inisherin, much of which comes not from the trying natural environment but from the inhabitants. Padraic is the one man who seems to remain untouched by all of the jealousy and judgment that his sister perceives as the chief characteristic of the Inisherin natives. The two siblings are locals as well, but Padraic is “a nice man,” and Siobhan is a bookworm who recognizes the boundaries—mental and physical—of island life all too well to be caught up in the ballyhoo and pettiness she witnesses around her. Though they are very different, both Siobhan and Padraic are outsiders, and they love one another for all that they are and the others are not.
Yet Padraic’s refusal to listen to Colm’s admonitions to stay away produce the exact effect that Colm contends Padraic’s dullness has already caused, albeit in a more literal way. Colm knows that Padraic’s friendship has done and can do nothing to ward away the existential loneliness of life, and he’ll be damned if Padraic shouldn’t be made to understand this unrelenting reality. And so Colm begins to slice off his fingers each time Padraic interacts with him (a rather counterproductive response, as Siobhan [Kerry Condon], Padraic’s clear-eyed sister, points out).
The other outsider in this story is Dominic, who is the village “gom” and the most tragic of the characters. Still just a teenager, Dominic is ignorant and odd, but as the prime punching bag of his physically and sexually abusive policeman father, it is hard not to wonder how he might have turned out if he had grown up in different circumstances. Dominic and Padraic are driven together after Colm abandons Padraic, and the two share a friendship that is based on mutual acceptance—at least until Padraic admits to Dominic that he has done something rather mean-spirited, and Dominic realizes that Padraic is taking an irreversible path away from being “nice” and becoming like everyone else.
After Colm’s melodramatic—and futile—finger-slicing inadvertently causes the death of Jenny, Padraic’s beloved miniature donkey, Padraic breaks. He can no longer and will no longer be “nice.” Abandoned by his best friend, his sister (who, perceiving the same existential threat as Colm, packs up and heads to the mainland for a librarian job), and his favorite pet, he commits to a vendetta against Colm that he pledges will last until one of their deaths.
Ultimately, Dominic is found dead in the lake; Siobhan has left; and Padraic, in becoming “as bad as all the others,” in Dominic’s words, is no longer an outsider. The distractions that kept Padraic from seeing an inevitable reality have been torn away, and all that is left is the persistent roar of the sea.
Early in the film Siobhan asks her brother if he never feels lonely. He scoffs and leaves, uninterested in what he views as a useless discussion for someone who spends every afternoon in the pub in good company. By the end of the film, after he writes to Siobhan to refuse her offer to join her on the mainland, we see him lying alone in his bedroom, Jenny’s bell clutched in his hand, his cows and horse wandering through the house as he sleeps.
From the first shot of Everything Everywhere All At Once, this film is a delight. In the span of its 2-hour-plus runtime, the film cartwheels, karate-chops, and cuddles its way across the spectrum of human emotions. That the film succeeds in doing this with total poise and control—even as it addresses the utter chaos that is existence—is miraculous. In fact, though, it isn’t a miracle; it is the result of the perfect genius of its creators.
Every aspect of the film is so expertly curated to feel real that each key creator behind the film deserves their own special award. Everything—from the dialogue to the acting, from the costuming to the palette to the lighting to the choreography and special effects—is gorgeous, interesting, and necessary to the narrative.
As the title suggests, this film is about everything, everywhere, and how it is all happening all at once. In a nutshell. Amongst all of that everything happening everywhere, there is Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese-American woman running a laundromat with her self-effacingly sweet husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). Evelyn is intelligent enough to recognize just how far the life she has is from the life she envisioned. Her frustration with her reality, however, inhibits her from seeing how the other players in this particular reality are more important than the details of the reality itself.
Evelyn’s frustration with her reality inhibits her from seeing how the other players in this particular reality are more important than the details of the reality itself.
And the question of this particular reality is an important one, because Evelyn discovers, or rather is thrown into, a complex web of apparently limitless realities, each one the result of minute choices and changes in conditions that ripple out to create whole new universes. The controlled confusion and chaos of this system is the equivalent of a cosmic washing machine.
Which brings us back to the laundromat, and Evelyn’s discontent with the reality in which she is, apparently, “her worst self.” Aside from her strained relationship with Waymond, which has reached the point of Waymond serving his wife divorce papers, Evelyn also struggles to comprehend her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), what with her swearing, her tattoos, and, above all, her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel). Evelyn’s relationship with Joy is in many ways a reiteration of her relationship with her own father, Gong Gong (James Hong). His need to control his daughter ultimately resulted in disowning her when she made a decision that he disagreed with—the same decision that led her life to the laundromat connected to the dingy apartment she grumbles around in every day now. That decision was to follow Waymond to the United States and the promise of a better, freer life.
But the collective weight of disappointment and bitterness in Evelyn’s life—both the one at hand and the infinite number of other alternate lives—has disrupted the balance of the cosmos, and its manifestation has taken a form that takes Evelyn completely off guard. So begins a whiplash-inducing epic battle involving Evelyn’s countless alternate selves against the embodiment of chaos and meaninglessness, Jobu Tupaki.
Amidst the gorgeous special effects, the Oscar-worthy (and Oscar-winning) acting, and the dazzling storyline straddling the intersection of action, fantasy, drama, and comedy, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that the drivers of each character are really very basic, even against this cinematically and narratively innovative backdrop. Gong Gong is a man at the end of his days who seems to be fixated on the failures he perceives in his child’s life. Waymond is a trod-upon husband who just wants his wife to breathe and give him a cuddle. Joy wants her mother to stop and listen, for once.
And Evelyn, well…what is it that she wants? She has people around her who love her and want to help her, but her own frustrations blind her from seeing this, and it would require too many adjustments to her worldview based on thwarted potential for her to be willing to see it. Also, she really wants to not have to do taxes anymore, but this probably goes for all humans everywhere. Learning to jump between “verses” (or the different realities that branch out from each individual decision) is the only way Evelyn can take on Jobu, but learning to resist the temptations of remaining in these alternate existences is fundamental.
It would require too many adjustments to Evelyn’s worldview based on thwarted potential for her to be willing to see what she has around her.
In other words, the great challenge is knowing that all of these other possibilities exist but still accepting the single reality one is actually living for what it is. This is why the Evelyn in this life, in this universe of all the multiverses, is the key to restoring balance. She must learn to let go of the disappointment of unrealized expectations and not only accept but embrace what is. Moreover, she must learn to see the (J)joy, beauty, and value even in this life where disappointment and rejection have characterized all of her decisions, leading her to become her worst self. If she can manage to find that which is precious even in the most disappointing iteration of her existence, everything can fall back into place.
Among the many successes of this film is that even the opening 10 minutes, during which all we see are the very mundane details of Evelyn’s life as the disgruntled owner of a local coin laundromat persecuted by the enigmas and injustices of the American tax system, are engrossing. The characters are each so well drawn that their personal and family dramas would promise in and of themselves to make a worthy film. That Everything Everywhere All At Once goes so breathtakingly far beyond this renders it a masterpiece in any universe.