{"id":464887,"date":"2026-05-24T14:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/464887\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T14:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:26:08","slug":"everytime-review-sandra-wollners-poised-haunting-third-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/464887\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Everytime’ Review: Sandra Wollner’s Poised, Haunting Third Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEveryone who has ever experienced serious grief knows the strange, unsettling things it can do to time: stretching it or compressing it by turns, consigning some passages of it to a black hole of memory, or sometimes just suspending it entirely. Pretty much all these possible stages and cruel temporal tricks of the mind are felt in Sandra Wollner<\/a>\u2018s shattered, piercing family study \u201cEverytime<\/a>,\u201d until the present loops back on the past entirely, and which (or whose) reality we\u2019re in becomes a matter very much up for debate. Elevating low-key domestic portraiture with extraordinary technical finesse, toward a big-swing finale of radical conceptual daring, the Austrian filmmaker\u2019s third feature felt like the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year\u2019s Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, and duly won the top prize there.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat win will ensure healthy arthouse distribution for this outwardly challenging but emotionally involving work which will certainly see more theatrical play than Wollner\u2019s name-making previous film, the startling 2020 sci-fi drama \u201cThe Trouble With Being Born.\u201d That film\u2019s prospects were curtailed by the pandemic, certainly, but also by its confronting, controversial premise, involving a childlike AI android sexually abused by its creator. \u201cEverytime\u201d isn\u2019t nearly as blatant a provocation, though it confirms Wollner\u2019s aptitude for needling, subtly uncanny narratives that linger to increasingly disconcerting effect in the mind, and her visually and sonically commanding way of realizing them \u2014 this time in collaboration with ace \u201cAftersun\u201d cinematographer Gregory Oke, clearly the man to call if you need an all-inclusive coastal resort suffused with soul-bleaching light and creeping dread.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s on the eve of a family vacation to one such place in Tenerife that Berlin teenager Jessie (Carla H\u00fcttermann) steals away for a blissed-out evening with her boyfriend Lux (Tristan Lopez) \u2014 a leisurely few hours of aimless ambling and circular conversation that plays out in a manner reminiscent of German auteur Angela Schanelec\u2019s semi-surreal walking-and-talking features, further fuzzed by the addition of whatever drugs Lux has at his disposal. <\/p>\n

\n\tTo watch the sunrise, the inebriated couple climb to the rooftop of a high-rise tower block, where Lux falls asleep and Jessie stands too close to the edge. The ensuing tragedy \u2014 shot by Oke with the camera in wide, sweeping flight, following Jessie\u2019s gaze on a loosely soaring bird before slowly traveling back to find her body in silent freefall \u2014 is the first of Wollner\u2019s gasp-inducing cinematic coups, executed with such nonchalant candor that you briefly don\u2019t trust your eyes.<\/p>\n

\n\tA year or so later, Jessie\u2019s single mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr, \u201cEveryone Else\u201d) and younger sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) are doing their best to carry on as a family of two, incorporating regular maintenance of Jessie\u2019s grave into their routine of mundane chores and outings. But it\u2019s hard to shake the air of hollow, broken-spirited pretense in the household as mother and daughter play-act at normality, ostensibly looking after each other but retreating into themselves at every opportunity. For Melli, technology is an outlet for her mourning: She still regularly texts her sister\u2019s phone, and spends hours playing a \u201cMinecraft\u201d-style 8-bit video game that rearranges the irregular world around her into comfortingly exact geometric shapes. That\u2019s a realm the film itself dives into for extended, immersive and blearily entrancing interludes \u2014 a gateway into its eventual, more drastic breakdown of rational reality, controlled by one player\u2019s will.<\/p>\n

\n\tLux, meanwhile, is left adrift, travelling hither and thither as he works through his own grief and guilt, but eventually returning to Berlin to assume an unspoken, undefined place in Ella and Melli\u2019s gaping family unit. In a beautifully contained performance that shows both glimmers of tender, redirected parental instinct toward the boy and festering resentment, Minichmayr centers the film during its aptly meandering, shellshocked middle section. But it\u2019s in the final third \u2014 as the three take the vacation that was canceled by Jessie\u2019s death \u2014 that \u201cEverytime\u201d enters new, searching emotional and philosophical territory, with a series of stunning atmospheric shifts and returned imagery that permits, perhaps, the possibility of a new beginning.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a dazzling, fairly unnerving finale that Wollner arguably over-complicates with one too many new, dimension-tilting story elements, including a sudden introduction of voiceover that the film would lose no power by shedding. But an excess of substantial ideas and interpretive possibilities is a luxurious flaw to have in a film, and what sticks in \u201cEverytime\u201d are the starkest, least explicable intrusions of dreamlike incident into the world we think we know, which Wollner and her collaborators have thus far outlined with such rigor and precision. It\u2019s the film\u2019s most audacious logical and stylistic swerves that will continue to turn heads on the festival circuit, clearly confirming its helmer as a major in the making, but not in a way that feels like empty auteur showoff-ery: Even through its more inscrutable story turns, \u201cEverytime\u201d remains deeply, legibly and sometimes overwhelmingly felt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everyone who has ever experienced serious grief knows the strange, unsettling things it can do to time: stretching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10532,93,201104,61,60,270,201105],"class_list":["post-464887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-everytime","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-sandra-wollner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}