Title: Everytime
Foreign Title:
Year: 2026
Countries: Germany/Austria
Language: In German and Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Sandra Wollner
Click here to see the cast and crew
Grief is a complex emotion. It hibernates inside and suddenly erupts, sometimes without an apparent reason. Sandra Wollner’s powerful film explores this complexity in a slow, gentle yet deeply unsettling way.
Jessy dies the day before the family’s yearly vacation to Tenerife. The night before, she parties with her boyfriend Lux. They take drugs, climb to a rooftop to watch the sunrise, and Jessy falls to her death.
It’s no one’s fault. The film doesn’t look for blame or criticize parenting or youth culture. Instead, it observes, through small non-events and subtle nuances, how Jessy’s mother, younger sister Melli, and Lux deal with the loss.
Time passes. They try to continue their lives: Melli with her friends, Lux with a new girlfriend, the mother returning to work. Yet grief is always present, and this is where Wollner’s cinematic mastery comes into play.
Through controlled cinematography and editing, she creates a haunting tension without dramatic confrontations. She holds the gaze a little longer, cuts scenes unexpectedly, and introduces fragments of Minecraft gameplay and home video, all aiming at making the viewer feel the pain. Slowly, the shields of normality begin to crack. Guilt, pain, and absence can no longer be contained.
The three go on vacation to Tenerife, where the mother breaks down: “Sometimes I just forget.”
In the final half hour, the film takes a surreal turn. Although still a tour de force of cinematic craftsmanship, the voice-over and increasingly complex narrative felt like one step too far for me. It didn’t make me understand the protagonists, or grief, any better.
Still, a powerful film, beautifully conceived and executed.
