Yes, the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once are trying to destroy your brain

polygon.com:

It isn’t hyperbole to say that the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once are out to shatter people’s intellects with their movie. They consider it one of the film’s major goals. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — often collectively credited as “Daniels” — are aware they’re making movies for a media-savvy audience that will recognize their riffs on The Terminator, The Matrix, and (in the movie’s best cameo) 2001: A Space Odyssey. But while they’re tapping into how familiar some of their images and quotes might seem, they also want to bypass the way familiarity helps an audience predict where a film is going, and maintain distance from it.

Which helps explain why Everything Everywhere is such a fast-paced barrage of big ideas and overwhelming images. Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, a woman caught up in an adventure that pulls her between the vastly different possible universes her life decisions might have led to. The film lays out an entire multiverse and a science fiction technology that lets people access it, but it’s still primarily a personal story about Evelyn, and her connections with her husband, daughter, and father. Polygon recently sat down with the Daniels to talk about the film’s biggest ideas and where they came from, and about that idea that it’s important to break the audience so they have to take in everything, all at once.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Your work, both in movies and in shorts, videos, and other projects, has such a distinctive voice. At the same time, it’s so referential, with this movie drawing from Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman, and Douglas Adams, with nods to everything from Ratatouilleto The Matrix. Is it hard for you to pull back from