'Lily Topples The World' Review
Lily Topples the World follows 20-year-old Lily Hevesh — the world's greatest domino toppler and the only woman in her field — in a coming-of-age story of artistry, passion, and unlikely triumph.
The untold story of professional domino toppler Lily Hevesh, titular subject of the doc Lily Topples the World, is an inspirational one that I can relate to on a personal level. A shy girl who got into the art she was obsessed with at a very young age pursued it as her hobby from childhood. It became her professional career in adulthood and changed her life, accomplishing so much while still being in her early 20s. I see you girl. I love stories like that because it’s not so far off from what my career feels like.
Lily Topples the World follows Lily Hevesh who started doing domino art as a kid, uploading her elaborate domino sets on YouTube and becoming a global phenomenon.
The strongest aspect of the documentary itself is the titular subject. You instantly fall in love with Hevesh as you witness her day-to-day life traveling across the world, either working corporate gigs to make meticulous sets or working with families and young kids, teaching them the art of domino toppling. Hevesh exudes an admirable kind and welcoming personality that is so wholesome. She went from humble beginnings to being a self-made success thanks to the power of the internet and she still keeps a friendly mentality to this day. It makes you want to be her friend.
As you follow Hevesh from gig to gig, you learn about the influence she had within the YouTube community, as well as media outside of the web, ranging from TV to film. Remember that opening scene in the Will Smith movie Collateral Beauty with the elaborate domino set topple? Lily Hevesh did that. She was the person who controlled the only cool aspect of that movie!
From time to time, you’ll see Hevesh meet up with other YouTube domino personalities like herself and even they admit that she was the pioneer for their community. If there’s anything this doc makes you want to do, it’s to give her a YouTube subscription (if you haven’t already) while also wanting to be her friend. You see her meet up with younger fans at VidCon who cry in her presence because of how inspired they are by her. She gives them hugs, signs their stuff, takes pictures, the normal VidCon flair, but she keeps her humbleness throughout. She is truly a great subject to follow, but I wish the documentary itself had more fluent storytelling than the cut I witnessed.
As much as the film makes an admirable portrait of Hevesh, who is an absolute delight to spend time with on camera, the portrait of the iconic toppler feels like it’s missing a ton of pieces to make this vision feel whole.
The movie (as of now, while I write this review) does not have a distributor but don’t be surprised if it ends up on YouTube Premium, because much of it feels like a YouTube advertisement. As Hevesh navigates from location to location, you see a pop-up of whatever YouTube personality she encounters, along with the number of subscribers they had at the moment of filming. It’s fine in the sense that it helps novice viewers know who exactly she’s interacting with, but showing how many subscribers they have is completely unnecessary, especially when she interacts with celebrity figures. By the time you see her with the likes of Will Smith and his YouTube profile pops up, the film feels more commercialized.
The film is so jumbled, making surface-level observations about Hevesh’s career rather than being insightful in terms of Hevesh herself. Seeing her go from corporate gig to corporate gig is cool and all, but there are other questions you ask while seeing her day-to-day life. How is she able to balance her schoolwork and her career? How often does she get to travel in the middle of a semester? What was she like growing up from the perspective of her older brother and sister? How does she get contacted to host gigs for families or work on big-scale productions that end up in movies? Hevesh’s accomplishments are so fascinating but the doc focuses too much on her career as a professional YouTuber rather than her as a human being. To describe how scatterbrained this storytelling is, it’s not until the 40-minute mark of this 90-minute doc that you get the depth of her family’s background and her childhood.
Lily was born in China and was orphaned due to the country’s one-child policy, which ruled the nation at the time (cc: Nanfu Wang’s doc One Child Nation for a better understanding). An American family adopted her and gave her all the love they could provide. The film explains how some of the repressed childhood trauma she faced as an orphan affected her upbringing. That’s the authentic stuff I gravitate towards because it gives the viewer insight into her personality. That could’ve been the prominent basis of the doc — exploring how her love for domino building helped her break out of her shell, along with picking up other talents in the long run that helped her be the multitalented badass that she is today. But the film avoids doing that to focus on the impact of her YouTube persona and the gigs she’s done thus far, which is a shame because it dilutes the effect of her story. Hell, you don’t get the artist intimacy of seeing her at her craft, though you periodically you get bits and pieces of her pre-planning process before getting down to business.
At the end of the day, Lily Topples the World works as a light and inspirational doc due to the likable and down to Earth subject herself. It’s enlightening to see the level of impact and success this young woman has experienced so far in her career, but director Jeremy Workman’s focal point is more about career and influence than Hevesh’s personal life, which makes the doc itself disappointingly bland.
