Everything Everywhere All at Once and Kishotenketsu Structure

Aristotelian drama insists on a zero-sum collision. Character wants gold; dragon guards gold; character slays dragon or perishes trying. Hollywood screenwriting manuals have codified this binary into dogma: identify the protagonist, establish the flaw, ramp up the antagonistic force, and force an ultimate showdown. When a screenplay departs from that Western teleology, development executives often panic because they mistake a lack of martial escalation for a lack of narrative momentum.

Consider what happens when a story abandons collision in favor of contrast. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert built a machine that resembles a superhero blockbuster on the surface while operating under an ancient four-part narrative model: kishōtenketsu. Originating in Chinese classical poetry and refined in Japanese literary tradition, kishōtenketsu organizes dramatic material not around dialectical conflict, but around changes of perspective. By substituting exposure for violence, the Daniels cracked the central dilemma of contemporary storytelling: how to resolve cosmic stakes with domestic intimacy without shrinking the canvas.

The Anatomy of the Twist

Traditional screenplays depend on an inciting incident that forces a protagonist across a threshold into an antagonistic world. Kishōtenketsu takes a different route through four phases: ki (introduction), shō (development), ten (the twist or complication), and ketsu (the synthesis). The crucial distinction lies in the third phase. In a three-act structure, the midpoint or second-act turn ratchets up pressure against an established antagonist. In kishōtenketsu, ten introduces material that appears disconnected from the premise; it seems almost unrelated, requiring the audience to assemble a new conceptual frame.

The first hour of the film establishes ki with meticulous precision: an audit room, an ailing father, an unfiled tax return, and an impending divorce. Shō extends this pressure through verse-jumping, introducing the multiverse as an escalation of bureaucratic panic. A conventional script would treat Jobu Tupaki as a boss villain requiring elimination. The climax would feature Evelyn Wang acquiring superior combat skills to obliterate the nihilistic threat, preserving her baseline reality by annihilating the intruder.

Instead, the script deploys ten with full force: two sentient rocks resting on a canyon rim in a universe where conditions never produced life. The rock universe contains no dialogue, no movement, and no violence; subtitles carry the weight of an existential impasse. This scene does not raise the physical stakes. It recontextualizes them. The universe where nothing matters ceases to be a terrifying cosmic void; it becomes a sanctuary from generational exhaustion. By refusing to let the conflict escalate into martial triumph, the Daniels use the twist to shift Evelyn from dread to empathy.

The Concentric Bagel

This structural pivot relies on spatial design. Rather than a linear march toward a showdown, the narrative operates as a set of concentric circles. At the core sits the Wong family home. The next band encompasses the laundromat, then the sterile IRS regional office, then the widening multiverse, and finally the void of Jobu Tupaki’s black bagel. Every outer ring mirrors an inner wound. When the multiverse threatens to collapse into the abyss, it mirrors the fracture between Evelyn and her daughter Joy.

This spatial approach shares striking thematic DNA with series like Severance, created by Dan Erickson. In that series, the architecture of the Lumon corporation acts as an ideological trap where sterile hallways mirror fractured psyches. Yet where modern thrillers weaponize claustrophobia to trap characters in recursive loops, much like the video-game restarts analyzed in Russian Doll, kishōtenketsu uses expanding scope to dissolve division.

The synthesis, or ketsu, delivers the masterstroke. Evelyn does not defeat the agents of the IRS office or the multiverse henchmen by overpowering them; she heals them. Armed with infinite perspective gained in ten, she fights with weapons of emotional remediation, granting each combatant their secret longing. She defeats the threat not by winning the game, but by breaking the binary logic of the battlefield.

What the Writer Can Steal

Screenwriters frequently hit walls in third acts because they mistake external opposition for meaning. When writers assume every dramatic question requires a fistfight or a legal verdict, climaxes become noisy, formulaic, and hollow. The lesson of kishōtenketsu is not that conflict is useless; rather, conflict is merely one mechanism for generating forward motion.

To borrow from this methodology, examine the central impasse in your script. Ask what piece of information, what alternate vantage point, or what sudden shift in scale would render physical combat irrelevant. Introduce a third element in your third movement that appears unrelated to the immediate tactical fight: a quiet room, a forgotten memory, or an extreme shift in perspective that forces both sides to rethink the board. The synthesis must synthesize, not merely survive.

The challenge facing ambitious writers is moving past the illusion that conflict alone creates tension. A collision makes noise; a synthesis changes understanding. When the chaos recedes and Evelyn returns to the dull beige desk of the IRS investigator, nothing about her material reality has altered. The laundromat remains in financial jeopardy. The divorce papers still exist. Yet everything has shifted because the frame widened to fit the pain. How many of our screenplays remain small simply because we refuse to abandon the duel?