Everything Everywhere All At Once plays a clever dialect trick that adds to the development of its characters. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is a laundromat owner trying to get her taxes done when she suddenly finds herself recruited by an alternate version of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) to save the entire multiverse. Everywhere Everywhere All At Once became one of 2022's sleeper hits, standing as A24's highest grossing movie and earning a slew of Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
Like the infinite multiverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a densely layered, with many themes and interpretations to be found under its blend of comedy, sci-fi, and martial arts. One of the most subtle clever details is in how Everything Everywhere All At Once uses the different Chinese dialects of Cantonese and Mandarin. The times at which Everything Everywhere All At Once employs the two dialects reveals a lot about its story and characters.
What Language Really Means In Everything Everywhere All At Once
As revealed in the movie's Amazon X-ray trivia feature, Evelyn speaks Cantonese to her father Gong Gong (James Hong) and Mandarin to Waymond. This gives a glimpse into the beginnings of Evelyn's relationship with Waymond by indicating that Evelyn and Waymond likely grew up in different regions of China before meeting in Hong Kong. Where Everything Everywhere All At Once's dialect switch really gets deep is with Evelyn's daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), which itself highlights how Joy's Alpha-verse doppelganger Jobu Tupaki becomes Everything Everywhere All At Once's villain.
When speaking to Joy, Evelyn frequently oscillates between Cantonese and Mandarin, with Joy being able to easily converse with the former but having far more difficulty with the latter, which perfectly encapsulates their whole relationship. When the film begins, Joy has a strained relationship with Evelyn, due to Joy's romance with her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel). With Joy having trouble talking to Evelyn in a literal level, Everything Everywhere All At Once symbolizes their difficult relationship, capturing the fact of Joy already having a difficult time communicating with Evelyn in a larger sense.
EEAAO's Language Switches Make Deidre A Better Villain
The film's language trick is also at play with the Wang family's tax auditor Deidre (Jamie Lee Curtis), setting her up as another antagonist of Everything Everywhere All At Once's multiverse story. Right off the bat, Deidre comes off as a patronizing bureaucrat in how she handles the Wang family's taxes when they are clearly in a difficult situation (though Evelyn admittedly does herself no favors by declaring a karaoke machine to be a business expense.) Deidre's comments belittling the language barrier between herself and the Wangs, however, adds an element of xenophobia to her personality, making her an even more unlikable character from the outset.
As a hidden touch to the film, Everything Everywhere All At Once uses its Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue to progress its story in a very clever way. As exemplified by its use of two Chinese dialects, Evelyn seeks to heal her relationship with Joy and teach Deidre both to loosen up and accept other cultures, with Evelyn succeeding in both by the ending of Everything Everywhere All At Once.