Nila Kartika Wati
Grief is rarely a linear experience; it is a distortion of time, a psychic splintering that stretches minutes into hours and compresses years into a heartbeat. It is this volatile, shape-shifting nature of mourning that Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner explores with surgical precision in her latest feature, Everytime. Winner of the top prize at this year’s Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, the film stands as a masterclass in formal innovation, transforming a domestic portrait of loss into a radical, dimension-tilting meditation on the fragility of reality.
By elevating low-key, intimate storytelling with extraordinary technical finesse, Wollner has cemented her status as one of European cinema’s most daring auteurs. Everytime is a work that feels both structurally experimental and emotionally devastating—a rare synthesis that challenges the audience’s perception of the present even as it interrogates the permanence of the past.
The Chronology of a Collapse
The narrative of Everytime begins with a deceptive sense of mundane tranquility. We are introduced to Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), a Berlin teenager on the precipice of a family vacation to a sun-drenched coastal resort in Tenerife. Before the trip, she steals away for an evening with her boyfriend, Lux (Tristan Lopez). Their time together is captured in a style reminiscent of Angela Schanelec’s semi-surrealist walking-and-talking features—aimless, circular, and fuzzed by the hazy influence of narcotics.
The film’s first tectonic shift occurs when the pair, intoxicated by the night and each other, climb to the rooftop of a high-rise tower block to watch the sunrise. In a moment of devastating spontaneity, Lux falls into a deep, drug-induced sleep, and Jessie, lingering too close to the precipice, disappears.
Wollner captures this tragedy with a sequence of technical audacity that is likely to become a hallmark of her career. Cinematographer Gregory Oke—whose work on Aftersun already established him as a master of "soul-bleaching" light and encroaching dread—follows a bird in wide, sweeping flight before the camera tracks back to find Jessie’s body in silent, mid-air descent. It is a moment of such nonchalant, clinical candor that the audience is forced to question the veracity of their own sight.
A year later, the aftermath of this tragedy has calcified into a brittle, hollow routine. Jessie’s mother, Ella (played with searing, contained grief by Birgit Minichmayr), and her younger sister, Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), exist in a state of suspended animation. They play-act at normalcy, maintaining Jessie’s grave as if it were a household chore, while internally retreating into isolation.
Melli, in particular, navigates her mourning through technology. She sends unanswered texts to her sister’s phone and loses herself in an 8-bit, Minecraft-style video game. This digital realm serves as a thematic anchor for the film, as the geometric rigidity of the game begins to bleed into the characters’ lived reality, signaling the beginning of the film’s descent into a more porous, malleable sense of truth.
Supporting Data: A Stylistic Evolution
Everytime arrives as the third feature from Sandra Wollner, following her 2020 breakout, The Trouble With Being Born. While that film was met with both critical acclaim and intense controversy due to its provocative premise—a child-like AI android subjected to the desires of its creator—Everytime opts for a different kind of provocation. It is not an overt moral challenge, but a sensory and psychological one.
The film’s success in the festival circuit is bolstered by the technical collaboration between Wollner and Oke. The use of light in Everytime is thematic: it is an all-inclusive, relentless brightness that strips away the shadows where grief usually hides, leaving the characters exposed.
The middle section of the film, which features the return of Lux to the family home, serves as the emotional core. Lux, adrift and burdened by survivor’s guilt, assumes an ambiguous, unstated role within the household. Minichmayr’s performance is the steadying hand during these meandering scenes; she manages to convey both a maternal, redirected instinct toward the boy and a simmering, toxic resentment that feels deeply human.
The final third of the film represents its most ambitious gamble. As the three characters finally embark on the Tenerife vacation that was meant to include Jessie, the film abandons traditional narrative beats in favor of atmospheric, dreamlike sequences. It is here that the boundary between the living and the dead—or perhaps the boundary between one person’s grief and another’s—becomes almost entirely erased.
Official Responses and Industry Reception
The critical reception following the Cannes premiere has been overwhelmingly positive, with many reviewers highlighting the film’s refusal to provide easy answers. Critics have lauded the film’s ability to "needle" the audience, creating a sense of unease that lingers long after the credits roll.
"It is a film of extraordinary technical finesse," noted one Cannes critic. "Wollner has managed to make the conceptual, the digital, and the deeply human coexist in a way that feels completely original."
While some have noted that the finale becomes slightly over-complicated—specifically citing a late-stage introduction of voiceover that threatens to clutter the film’s cleaner, visual metaphors—the consensus remains that these are "luxurious flaws." An excess of ideas, in the context of contemporary arthouse cinema, is a testament to the filmmaker’s ambition rather than a failure of execution.
Implications for the Future of Arthouse Cinema
The victory at Un Certain Regard guarantees Everytime a healthy distribution path, positioning it as a significant title for arthouse audiences worldwide. For Wollner, this film solidifies her trajectory as one of the most vital voices in modern European cinema.
The implications of Everytime extend beyond its immediate box office potential. It signals a move toward a "post-narrative" style of filmmaking, where internal emotional landscapes are given as much weight as external events. By utilizing digital aesthetics—the 8-bit gaming, the distorted temporal shifts—Wollner is speaking the language of a generation that processes trauma through screens and simulations.
Furthermore, the film’s success challenges the notion that "challenging" cinema must be repellent or overtly provocative to be effective. Everytime is undeniably unsettling, but it is also profoundly empathetic. It suggests that the most radical thing a filmmaker can do is not to shock the audience, but to accurately map the internal geometry of a broken heart.
As the film moves into broader theatrical release, it will likely serve as a benchmark for how to balance formal experimentalism with emotional accessibility. Wollner has proven that she does not need to rely on "auteur showoff-ery" to make an impact; instead, she has created a work that is deeply, legibly, and overwhelmingly felt. Everytime is not just a film about a family mourning a loss; it is a film about the architecture of memory itself, and how, in the face of impossible grief, we build new rooms in our minds just to keep surviving.
In the final assessment, Everytime succeeds because it trusts the viewer to navigate the silence. It does not force its logic upon the audience, but invites them to inhabit its strange, loop-filled world. By the time the final frames fade, the viewer is left not with a clear resolution, but with a visceral understanding of the film’s central conceit: that time is a construct, and the only thing truly persistent is the love—and the guilt—we carry for those we have lost.
Dwi Wanna
Jia Lissa
