With most movies, even the most imaginative ones, there comes a moment when everything starts to contract. For an hour or more, a movie will be impressing the audience with unexpected imaginative flights and turns of story, and then, as if a warning bell has gone off, the filmmakers pull back. They need to land the plane.

The great distinction of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is that it doesn’t ever pull back. On the contrary, it never stops expanding and coming up with new ideas. Eventually, the filmmakers do land the plane, but they don’t do it by including long explanations or by slapping a tidy moral onto the story. The movie ends well, and sensibly, but not in a way that you could ever see coming.

Without question, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a remarkable piece of work, one of the most original and creative films of the past couple of years. It’s so much its own thing that it’s hard to imagine how it was ever put together — how it was conceived, written, filmed and edited. Directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels) had nothing to fall back on, no genre conventions, no established patterns. They made this one up on their own.

If the movie has one weakness, it’s that it’s not nearly as enjoyable as it is brilliant. A movie like this is a full meal, and after two hours and 12 minutes, viewers may start to feel as force-fed as a goose on a French farm. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” never slows down and never wastes the audience’s time, and yet it’s safe to say that no one will walk out of the theater wishing it were 10 minutes longer.

It starsMichelle Yeohas Evelyn, a harried middle-aged woman trying to run a struggling laundry business. Her tax returns are being audited, and she feels that she’s not getting enough help from her sweet-natured husband (Ke Huy Quan). She tends to take her frustrations out on her lesbian daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), whom she can’t stop criticizing for everything, including her weight.

In the early minutes, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” could be a Chinese film. It’s almost entirely subtitled, and it has the frenetic pace of a Chinese comedy. As it goes on, it never quite loses that feeling, but it broadens. On the elevator, heading to the IRS office, Evelyn is told by a messenger from another universe that she is the only person with the power to save all the millions of universes from chaos and destruction.

This notion of a multiverse is getting a lot of traction in recent movies, but “Everything Everywhere All at Once” does it more and does it better — way better than the Marvel movies. The idea here is that the various Evelyns collectively have all the talents and capabilities that this Evelyn needs to possess in order to fight a war single-handedly. She just has to get more adept at establishing a mental connection with each Evelyn as required.

This set-up gives the filmmakers license to go anywhere and do anything, so that the film is constantly shifting between worlds and Evelyn personae — including one in which she is a movie star a lot like the real Michelle Yeoh, whose credits span from rom-coms like “Crazy Rich Asians”to action films like Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” It’s as visually wild as a Ken Russell movie, but like a Ken Russell movie in seven dimensions.

Yet for all the freedom that Kwan and Scheinert allow themselves, they wisely stay focused — sometimes firmly, sometimes casually — on the specific emotional dynamics of Evelyn’s family, on her relationships with her husband and daughter. That’s the barely visible thread that gently holds the movie within bounds.

Yeoh is superb, totally up for the action while understanding every nuance of the multiple Evelyns, in all their pettiness and potential grandeur. (She has a drawn-out brawl with Jamie Lee Curtis, as an IRS agent from another universe, that deserves to be anthologized.) Quan (“The Goonies,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”) is lovely and multidimensional as the husband and Hsu (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) shows considerable range in demonstrating the various incarnations of the daughter.

Kwan and Scheinert’s last film to get released,“Swiss Army Man,”2016年是最糟糕的电影之一——所以我坏内华达州吗er expected to hear from them again. But their new film shows either that you just never know what people are capable oforthat it really is possible to access abilities from other universes. Either way, with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” they’ve made an extraordinary movie.

N“Everything Everywhere All at Once”:Sci-fi action. Starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan. Directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. In English and portions in Chinese with English subtitles. (R. 132 minutes.) In theaters Friday, March 25.