I blame my parents. For everything. For waking up every morning, twisted in sheets, worrying about everything and nothing. For my shame (except the sexy bits, I’ll keep those). For my addiction to vegan Instagram. For my lack of ambition. For the glob of self loathing nesting at my core. Above all, I blame my parents for the decay of the membrane that holds the multiverse in place.

That, at least, is the vibe set by the science fiction comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once.

So, briefly: the plot. Evelyn Quan Wang and her husband Waymond are proprietors of a flailing laundromat in a sun-bleached corner of suburbia. Their daughter Joy is a portrait of teenage nihilism, deeply depressed and estranged from her parents, especially Evelyn. Evelyn, for her part, barely registers the distance between them. Instead she coats their shared world in fat-shaming and homophobia, introducing Joy’s long-term girlfriend to her grandfather as nothing more than a “best friend”

Alongside the domestic disquiet, the laundromat is creaking beneath crippling debts, and Evelyn is tormented by an upcoming meeting at the IRS, which could bring the whole house of soap suds down.

It’s in the midst of this turmoil that Evelyn’s grip on reality spins wildly out of control. During her humiliation at the hands of IRS inspector Deidre Beaubeirdre, Evelyn discovers not only that there are multiple universes each branching off from one another at every moment that a decision is taken, but that she is being hunted across this multiverse by a dimension hopping entity called Jobu, armed with a weapon that can devastate whole universes.

This movie is no Solaris. It doesn’t attempt to dive deeply into the implications of a multiverse (nor should it necessarily). The quantum spiel operates purely as metaphor, but for what exactly?

My initial assumption was that the multiverse stood as a metaphor for late capitalism. And I was justified. The film places a major emphasis on the corrosive role of debt on the Wang family. Also, visual effects seem to be inspired by contemporary social media aesthetics. The multitude of universes that Evelyn visits flicker past the screen giving of a world brimming with information but without the means to gain anything like knowledge or understanding. Debt and disorientation are palpable experiences in late capitalism.

There’s even a monologue that may as well have been lifted from an Adam Curtis documentary. Describing Jobu’s mysterious weapon, an alternate Waymond reflects that:

“We don’t know exactly what it is. We don’t know what it’s for. But we can all feel it. You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes… wrong. Our institutions are crumbling. Nobody trusts their neighbour anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself… How can we get back?”

At this juncture, I was reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book observing the stark reality that our imaginations are so constrained that it’s easier to envision the end of the world (in Hollywood’s fixation with apocalypse) than the end of capitalism. I thought that Evelyn’s adventures in the multiverse might trace a line of escape from this predicament, insofar as, if every possibility exists, then an alternative to capitalism is not only possible, but necessary and inevitable.

My hopes were dashed. In fact, the multitude of multiverses that Evelyn navigates are remarkably similar to her origin universe, with only one or two diverging details. For instance, there’s a universe where Evelyn is tasked with twirling a sign advertising a pizza parlour, or another where humans have evolved long, floppy, sausage-like fingers. Sausage-finger people – this is the limit of the human imagination.

Ultimately, the cause for the breakdown of Evelyn’s reality is not capitalism, but the rift between mother and daughter. That’s it. Jobu, we discover, is a version of Joy who, has built a kind of everything-bagel/black hole which will annihilate her despair by destroying the entire multiverse system. Fortunately, an extended heart-to-heart mother-daughter conversation is all it takes to save the multiverse from destruction, while capitalism is let off the hook.

So much of apocalyptic cinema is beamed through this familial lens. Think Birdbox or A Quiet Place. This is because, even though mangled and oversimplified, the ideas of Sigmund Freud cast a long shadow over Hollywood. The idea that all problems can be traced back to your family – especially your relationship with your mother – seems to lurk in at least every second film.

This general tendency in Capitalism was traced by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Capitalism exploits the nuclear family as both a means to propagate itself and obscure its dominance in everyday life. The home where estrangement festers, the IRS office where the state wields debt as social control, and the laundromat where Evelyn’s enormous capacities are whittled down to a few basic functions – these are all spaces where capitalism produces itself on and through human beings and the relations between them.

But in the film, when Evelyn heals the rift with her daughter, everything goes back to normal, and she can resume her role as an obedient subjects of capitalism, even making friends with the IRS inspector who persecuted her.

Not all films are blind to the role of capitalism. Beau is Afraid is a similarly psychedelic journey across a fractured reality that also uses familial trauma to drive the action. In contrast to Everything Everywhere All at Once, Beau’s adventures shows how parental guilt and shame makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Mega-corporations exploit anxieties produced at the site of the family to increase their profits and cement their control over consumers.

Yet, even though its critique is on point, Beau is Afraid is just as clueless when it comes to offering alternatives, leaving us enlightened, but stranded in the abyss.

Perhaps the rot is so deep, that it extends all the way to down to the kinds of stories we have been conditioned over centuries to enjoy. If so, we are badly in need of a multiverse if we’re ever going to find our way to a world where the human imagination is not so constrained as it is in ours.