I love big, sprawling movies that are about big issues: the meaning of life, the nature of humanity, time and space, the emotional heights and depths of our existence. And there was one movie this year that was the biggest and sprawlingest (okay, not a word, but this film deserves a new word) mediations on literally all of those topics and more. To be fair, Everything Everywhere All at Once could have been my #1 movie of the year because it’s not only big and sprawling, but masterful and as emotionally fulfilling as film gets. While I liked one other film just a hair more, that’s not a reflection on any unworthiness here. Everything Everywhere All at Once lives up to its name in all the best ways.

EEAAO (I’m not spelling it out every time, sorry) focuses on Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat with her husband, Wayland (Ke Huy Quan, who you 80s kids know as Short Round from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies). She’s fed up with Wayland’s lack of seriousness, has a strained relationship with her daughter Joy (Broadway actress Stephanie Hsu) and her father (the venerable James Hong), and is being audited by the IRS. On her way to a meeting with the IRS agent–played by an initially unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis–a different version of Wayland comes to her to tell her that she’s the key to winning a multiverse war against the most powerful being in existence. He teaches her to travel to different universes so she can gather the skills she needs to fight from other, more impressive versions of herself, including a Hong Kong action star just like Michelle Yeoh, a singer, a hibachi chef, and a sign twirler (yes, it makes sense). When she “jumps” into these other universes, she sees all the different ways that her life could have turned out better; as she finds out from the the Alpha universe version of her father, she is the worst possible Evelyn. Her despair eventually turns into determination when she discovers that her Alpha-verse self actually created the big bad, Jobu Tupaki, while trying to train her daughter in the ways of the multiverse. She spends the rest of the movie jumping through a plethora of other universes in her attempt to rescue Joy from Jobu’s nihilism and also somehow hold her actual life together at the very point it seems to be shattering.

Just typing that description is…a lot. And Everything Everywhere All at Once is certainly a lot. It’s as much as a description as a title. As Evelyn travels through the multiverse, we get treated to as many twists on reality that writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (collectively, “Daniels”) imagination can come up with. Evelyn and Jobu show up in such versions as prisoner/prison guard, kung fu combatants, judge/lawyer, piñatas, and simple rocks in a universe where life never developed. So we get a lot of opportunities to laugh at how clever the different universes can be. But, while humor is a huge part of the draw, other emotions give the movie its core. Evelyn’s regret at a lifetime of missed opportunities is incredibly relatable. Her scenes in her movie star self with Wayland–who she didn’t marry in that universe–tug at the heart strings as she comes to realize that it’s not the other worlds, but her own, which has the things she values most. This regret and realization are a smaller version of the battle between Joy/Jobu and Evelyn. Jobu, having seen all of the universes, believes (knows?) that reality is meaningless, and she longs to destroy herself and bring Evelyn along for some company. Jobu’s snarky disdain for reality is experienced by Joy as pain–the pain of not understanding who she is and not being able to connect to her mother, the person she most needs to guide her. But it is through Evelyn, who also learns to experience all of everything at the same time, that the film finds its anchor. Her love for Joy, which she has never been able to fully express, reorients her view of everything. She finds that it is the kindness and joy of love which anchors us to reality, which provides meaning when we are tempted to think there is no meaning.

The movie is creatively and technologically marvelous. Everything from the cinematography to the editing to the costumes–Jobu’s costumes are a master class in fashion design–are exquisite. And the performances are even better. Yeoh gets the meaty U.S. movie-star role she deserves. Hsu does a spectacular job in her first big film role. Jamie Lee Curtis is as daring as anyone playing so hard against type. And Quan, who we haven’t seen in so long, makes Wayland such a beautiful soul. There isn’t a false note in any of these performances, which is pretty amazing for a film which called for so much of the seemingly ridiculous. But that really is a big part of the charm. That the movie is so ambitious in its scope and ridiculous in many of its gags makes the fact that its characters are so emotionally compelling all the more impressive.

It shouldn’t be hard to realize by now that EEAAO is a really big deal. Just this morning, it led all films with 11 nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. But I hope that, if you haven’t seen it yet, you check it out. Because Everything Everywhere All at Once certainly deserves to be that really big deal.