film<\/a>, about a man who has an implied sexual relationship with a child-sized android coded with the memories of his missing 10-year-old daughter, unsurprisingly had trouble securing American distribution). Indeed, the grounded portraiture of the movie\u2019s first 70 minutes eventually gives way to a final act so cosmic and surreal that it becomes all but impossible to pinpoint the precise location of Wollner\u2019s characters in space-time; to say for certain whether \u201cEverytime\u201d has glitched into another dimension, or if it has invited another dimension to glitch into our own. Initially timeless in its nuanced and deeply recognizable depiction of loss, and then even more so as it gets devoured by the meta-modern flourishes that have fringed its story from the start, this is perhaps the most forward-thinking film I\u2019ve ever seen about the changing face of grief.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe premise couldn\u2019t be simpler, though Wollner\u2019s incredible prologue \u2014\u00a0a careful arrangement of low-event long takes that emphasize how people move through spaces in time \u2014 trains our eyes to privilege texture over incident. While there\u2019s little to distinguish single mother Ella (\u201cEveryone Else\u201d star Brigit Minichmayr) and her children from any of the other families strolling through the soft orange haze of a summer afternoon in Berlin, our senses pick up on the uneasy tension between the watchfulness of Gregory Oke\u2019s 35mm camera work and the vivid intensity of the film\u2019s sound design (it\u2019s worth noting that Oke also shot \u201cAftersun\u201d). The voices are close, but the bodies far away. Teenage Jessie (Carla H\u00fcttermann) turns her head to look at an unseen pop as her family walks home through their local metro station, but we don\u2019t think much of it at the moment. It\u2019s probably nothing. And yet, I suppose it could be anything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the very least, that sharp noise is enough to suggest that the film\u2019s environments may not be as benign as they seem, and a silent but soon unbearable tension starts to mount as the day wears on. As Jessie\u2019s boyfriend Lux (Trist\u00e1n L\u00f3pez) comes over to hang out while her kid sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) annoys the shit out of her by banging on a keyboard; as Ella cooks dinner; as Jessie plays \u201cMinecraft\u201d late into the night on an island bathed in the light of a sinking square sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Later, in the waning hours before Jessie\u2019s family is due to leave for a holiday in Tenerife (where she once vacationed as a toddler), Jessie and Lux will sneak out to a dance club, take a few pills, and watch the next day begin from their perch atop the roof of an apartment building. He will note that he\u2019s recently noticed a strange number of seagulls in Berlin, and then fall asleep. She will stand up to film one of them flying past on her iPhone, and then \u2014\u00a0in one of the most arresting screen images in recent memory, a vertiginous collision of everything and nothing all at once \u2014 she will fall off the edge of the building to her death. The city doesn\u2019t notice. The camera scans the treetops. The euphoric synth-pop of David Schweighart\u2019s score kicks in as we suddenly begin to soar through the skies of Jessie\u2019s \u201cMinecraft\u201d world, eventually plunging down through the dirt and into the unrendered levels of code below.<\/p>\n
From there, \u201cEverytime\u201d settles into a crushingly quotidian register. Months have passed, and everyone is doing what they can to move on with their lives. Ella takes work calls while visiting her daughter\u2019s grave, while the stoic young Melli texts life updates and other messages to her dead sister\u2019s phone (she\u2019s big on emojis). But things are not as settled as they seem, and Lux\u2019s return from a semester abroad forces Ella and Melli into a more direct confrontation with Jessie\u2019s memory \u2014\u00a0with the unresolved feelings she left behind. The girls keep running into Lux (and to his nice new girlfriend) around town, and soon begin spending time with him on purpose. They are bound together not only by their shared grief, but also by the unspoken guilt and blame that Lux and Ella can only hope to expiate through each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While Jessie is seldom mentioned by name, the bizarre mutual reliance between a middle-aged woman and her dead teenage daughter\u2019s former boyfriend makes her the subject of every scene (much to the annoyance of people who would prefer to compartmentalize the pain of her loss). Jessie is the reason why Ella and Melli attend Lux\u2019s birthday party; Jessie is the reason why Lux joins Ella for a tense lunch at her ex-husband\u2019s house, and why he begins sleeping over at her apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But these domestic frictions are \u2014\u00a0largely, but not merely \u2014\u00a0a means to an end so far as Wollner is concerned, as her film leverages them to focus on a series of increasingly abstract phenomena. Jessie is certainly the reason why each of the locations we saw her walk through before her death feels haunted when \u201cEverytime\u201d revisits them, but could she also be the reason why the shadow that falls across her bedroom at night appears to resemble a polygonal cube? Why a seemingly pilotless drone shows up to beckon Ella into a pitch-black parking garage? Why the dead girl\u2019s computer glows with an unnatural brightness whenever the lights turn off?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wollner\u2019s characters never ask such questions aloud, but she poses them to all three of her leads in a way that compels them to look for signs in the digital detritus that Jessie left behind. Lux is drawn back to the old pictures and voice notes on his phone, while Mille stares at the WhatsApp chat with her sister as if waiting for a response. These signs complement, but never overwhelm, Wollner\u2019s attention to the analog poetry of the natural world \u2014 to the shimmer along the surface of a lake, or the sound of the wind rustling through the trees in the woods where Jessie and Lux got high on her last night. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to imagine a version of this film that more explicitly addressed how digital technology is transforming how we mourn the dead, but Wollner would rather plumb the mysteries of the present than speculate about the answers of the future; the portals between worlds have already been ripped open, and will only begin to lose their power as they get labeled and branded.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eventually, Ella makes the spontaneous decision to bring Mille and Lux to Tenerife for the trip they never got to take. That\u2019s where things get weird, and the math of the universe starts to contradict itself. It would be a terrible disservice to reveal anything specific about what happens next (and so I won\u2019t), but the extraordinary magic trick that \u201cEverytime\u201d pulls off in its final stretch is rooted less in incident than in execution.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Its ineffable power belongs to how matter-of-factly Wollner tears apart the fabric of her film\u2019s reality at the same time as she threads it together, and how the look on Minichmayr\u2019s slacken face \u2014\u00a0her restrained but masterful performance a wonder of tightly bottled pain and lingering disbelief \u2014\u00a0reconciles those opposite energies with the instinctive naturalness of a mother\u2019s love. It also belongs to the almost unquestioning acceptance that Keiling endows within Melli, the young actor\u2019s posture embodying how this movie teeters on the precipice between a child-like vision of the world (soft and malleable) and the more hardened sense of reality that arrives with adulthood. <\/p>\n
Wollner may not trace the character\u2019s arc in the legible terms of a typical coming-of-age story, but Melli experiences a remarkable transformation over the course of the film, her petulant first line (\u201cYou always leave your stuff lying around!\u201d) assuming an unforeseeable new context by the time we arrive at her closing narration.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As a medium born from \u2014\u00a0and once dependent upon smoothing over \u2014\u00a0the friction between stillness and movement, stasis and change, cinema has always been uniquely adept at conveying the radical effect that technology can exert on how we perceive time and space in the world around us. The switch from celluloid to computer chips saw the movies transform from an illusory art form to a representative one, at the great and continued risk of forfeiting its original power. Engaging in a thrilling and increasingly contested negotiation between 35mm film stock and crude DV video formats, \u201cEverytime\u201d pulls at that tug-of-war from both ends until the uncertain space at the center grows large enough to sail through, and still enough to hang like a painting in the sky.<\/p>\n
I am now a father myself, the parent of two young kids whose faces sometimes remind me of my own dad in the same tactile way that people have been survived by their children since before the invention of the wheel. We keep a framed 4\u00d76 photograph of him with a cigar in his mouth on the Blu-ray shelf in our living room, and I sometimes catch my kids talking about it as if the picture itself were their grandfather, rather than just a capture of his likeness. Ask my six-year-old to draw a self-portrait and he\u2019ll sketch you the image of his Roblox avatar. If I ever were to lose him, I wonder how long it would take my nervous system to process that he was gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like many 21st century parents, my wife and I take photos and videos of our kids throughout the day without thinking, and \u2014 after wrestling them to bed at night in an exasperating forever war of attrition \u2014\u00a0we invariably scroll through our phones and take stock of their cuteness in peace. Stills, videos, stickers, and more, these two-dimensional images, I sometimes feel with an uncertain pang of dismay, are our real children. The versions of them we commit to memory. The after images we see in our dreams. They are the kids we mourn as our son and daughter eagerly outgrow their current models every time you look away for too long, and the ones we would cling to in the unthinkable event that either of them disappeared from this mortal coil before we did. <\/p>\n
And so, Wollner\u2019s staggering new film suggests with a tender but uneasy twinkle in its eye, we\u2019ve gradually steeped ourselves in a world that guarantees they never will. How strange and unnatural is that? Compared to the alternative, I fear it may not feel that strange or unnatural at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Grade: A<\/p>\n
\u201cEverytime\u201d is screening at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it in theaters in the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t believe in an afterlife, but that\u2019s OK because the people I love most are never going…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,252541,1554,337,209,252542,15896],"class_list":["post-890652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-everytime","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-sandra-wollner","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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