The films closest to Everything Everywhere All at Once put slapstick and grief in the same frame and refuse to pick. Swiss Army Man is the Daniels' own earlier swing, Being John Malkovich shares its absurd premise treated with total sincerity, and Synecdoche, New York is the sad version. Tell TasteRay how strange you want tonight.
The trick in Everything Everywhere All at Once is not the multiverse. It is that a fight scene involving trophies and a scene about a mother failing to say something to her daughter are given equal weight, and neither undercuts the other. Most films that reach for that tone lose one half.
What follows are the films that manage it, plus the ones that got there first. Several are considerably weirder. One is the saddest film on this site.
What makes a good Everything Everywhere All at Once-like
This is the hardest tone to match, because sincerity and absurdity usually cancel out. What holds them together is a concrete emotional problem underneath the invention: a marriage, a parent, a body. The invention then reads as an expression of that problem rather than a distraction from it, which is why the premise can be as silly as you like.
8 movies and TV series like Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Sources and further reading
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FAQs about Movies Like Everything Everywhere All at Once
Which of these is the closest match?
Swiss Army Man, because it is the same directors reaching for the same collision three years earlier with a fraction of the budget. A man befriends a flatulent corpse and it turns into a genuine film about loneliness. If the tonal whiplash of EEAAO worked on you, this is the purest dose.
Is Synecdoche, New York really comparable?
Only in method. Kaufman uses the same trick of literalising an inner state, building an ever-expanding replica of a life instead of a multiverse. But it removes almost all of the comedy and runs two hours on decline, so treat it as the same idea with the joy taken out.
Which one should I not start with?
Mr. Nobody, which is the most structurally demanding of the group and the least emotionally direct. It braids so many possible lives that first-time viewers often lose the thread. Start with Swiss Army Man or Being John Malkovich, where the premise is strange but the throughline is easy to hold.