Finding Christ in Everything Everywhere All at Once
My favorite film of the year may seem to defy God, but it only pushed me closer to His plan for my life.
My favorite film of 2022 (and one of my favorites of the past decade), is Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s cleverly written, masterfully directed, beautifully acted, and meticulously edited. I sat in theaters fully aware at every second that I was watching a masterpiece. Few days have passed since I watched it in early April that I haven’t thought about the film. Needless to say, this article discusses spoilers for the film.
Background
At the surface level, Everything Everywhere All at Once seems to be a complete antithesis to Christianity, or any God at all for that matter. The film’s message has been described as “Optimistic Nihilism” - life is meaningless, but because of that you should be positive and loving. And the journey of the film’s protagonist, Evelyn, reflects that perfectly.
Evelyn starts the film by resisting and fighting the notion that nothing matters. She quite literally fights this prospect through a series of hilariously absurd fight scenes, and morally debates this philosophy with her daughter, who has already adopted a nihilistic worldview. However, as the film progresses and Evelyn fully embraces the multiverse, she also begins to take on this nihilism. In the vast multitude of space and time, how could anything in her life (or even her universe) possibly matter? And if nothing matters, why should Evelyn do anything at all? Why not just embrace the chaos? It’s Evelyn’s husband, Waymond, who helps her reconcile this nihilism with his optimistic outlook on life:
You think because l'm kind that it means I'm naive. But it's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.
It’s at this moment that Evelyn realizes that even if “nothing matters” in her universe (or any), life shouldn’t be spent fighting or destroying. It should be spent loving. The best way to fight against the seeming meaninglessness of life is to love. And so Evelyn embraces love, loving her husband and daughter more than she ever has before.
The Christian Journey
The concept of nihilism is in direct contrast to Christianity. Christians believe everything matters. Christ’s presence can be found in everything, and since He’s called us to live our lives according to His will, all of life has meaning.
What fascinates me about the Daniels’ film however, is that this “optimistic nihilism” is much closer to Christianity than audiences may realize. In fact, director Daniel Kwan viewed the story as a direct parallel to his loss of faith and subsequent path to his new worldview:
I was very religious growing up. I was almost basically evangelical Christian until I was in my 20s. And then slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden, it was gone. And that’s kind of what this movie was trying to recreate. That moment when Evelyn is screaming, and she’s feeling everything, and she’s completely unmoored and lost, that is the experience of losing God. That’s the experience of not having a moral center, and not having a focus of meaning, of purpose. The second half of the movie is basically her trying to do what I did, which is crawl around in the dark and the chaos, finding something worth living for, finding something worth fighting for. Obviously in the movie, she finds that through her husband.
This quote, while explaining Kwan’s struggles with faith, actually shows just how relevant the Christian faith is to the film’s thesis. Kwan describes Evelyn’s struggle with feeling lost and not having meaning, and she ultimately finds that meaning through her husband (and family as a whole). However, Evelyn’s initial unhappiness with life, and the root of her struggles also came from her husband and family. Her arc is a full circle return to what she already had, just with renewed appreciation.
If Evelyn’s disillusionment with her family is meant to mirror Kwan’s disillusionment with Christianity, then the film’s third act actually supports the Christian journey, not Kwan’s own. Evelyn realizes her family means everything to her, and they’ve been there for her all along, even when she hasn’t been grateful. This can be viewed as a direct metaphor to someone returning to the faith, realizing that God has always been there and has always been faithful. Joel 2:13 says,
Now return to the Lord your God,
For He is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness.
If Everything Everywhere All at Once was truly about Evelyn’s loss of the Christian faith, then she would have found contentment in a different source by the end of the film. Maybe she would have finally pursued her dream career, or fallen in love with someone new and remarried. But she doesn’t. She comes full circle to realize that her husband has always loved her and been looking out for her. Their marital unhappiness, the perceived flaws were all because she couldn’t see the full picture. Her husband Waymond had consistently shown her compassion and love. And yet again, this parallels God’s call on our lives to return to Him in Hosea 6:1,
Come, let us return to the Lord.
For He has torn us, but He will heal us;
He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.
I don’t point any of this out as a “gotcha” moment towards the director. He’s fully aware of his own journey and his film’s intentions, more than I ever could be. I instead bring this up because through my own lens, that of the Christian faith, it’s crystal clear that Evelyn’s “salvation” in the film came from the source she had all along, something the director readily admitted.
Prodigals
I’d be remiss to discuss this topic without discussing one of Jesus’ most famous parables, the story of the prodigal son. In Luke 15, Jesus tells the story of a son who demands his inheritance from his father, only to squander it away and ultimately ruin his life. Broken, the son returns to his father, only to be met with open arms. The father exclaims, “This son of mine was dead, but has now come back to life. He was lost and has now been found.”
Much like the prodigal son losing his way, Kwan tells us that the “moment when Evelyn is...completely unmoored and lost, that is the experience of losing God.” And like the prodigal son’s empty life, Evelyn is left to “crawl around in the dark and the chaos, finding something worth living for.” And in both cases, Evelyn and the prodigal son find “something worth living for” by returning to the source of love that they’d always had. For Evelyn, that’s her husband. For the prodigal son, it’s his father. And for all of humanity, that source of love can be found in Christ.
So many of my friends and family members have lost their faith in God. Maybe He didn’t answer a prayer they desperately needed. Maybe they were discouraged by the constant institutional flaws found in religious organizations. Maybe they don’t understand why God would allow pain, hate, injustice, and cruelty into the world.
I find Everything Everywhere All at Once to be a nice reminder of the bigger picture of life. The universe is infinite, complex, and beyond our understanding. But if take a moment to look at the details of our lives, we might just find that Christ our Savior was there all along. He is our Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
I am everywhere—both near and far, in heaven and on earth. There are no secret places where you can hide from me.
Jeremiah 23:23-24