I want to think that there is an afterlife. A place where you are given an eternity’s rest or a “job well done” for all the trials and tribulations you’ve endured in life. But there’s one thing I am sure of: it’s mourning. Whether a friend or loved one is looking down on you— either taking the form of sun rays breaking through the clouds or a slight wind that grazes your skin like a hand on your shoulder — there is longing in remembrance. When you lose someone close to you, life becomes suspended in a routine of trying to keep their memory alive while acknowledging that their presence will never be what it was ever again.
Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime” is less concerned with confirming our hopes of a heaven above us or our fears of a hell below than with how the act of grieving fuses the past and present. The film enters a flow (especially in its third act) in which there is no easy way to track the character’s trajectory across location and time. That is by intriguing design, as Wollner’s own ambiguous proclamation takes shape. When we see a picture of someone who’s passed on or recall a story, we are transported back into that memory as if it were happening now. But then there’s the tidal wave of realizing we can’t stay there — as if a hand in the present pulls us out when the clock strikes zero.
Ella (Brigit Minichmayr) and her two daughters, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) and Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), are about to go on a nice summer vacation to Tenerife. The relationship between the older teen Jessie and younger Melli is like any sibling duo you would come across. When Jessie is trying to help her boyfriend, Lux (Tristán López), with some math problems, Melli does everything possible to get on their nerves. But it all means well. Jessie mentions she went to Tenerife as a toddler and remembers holding a man’s hand, but can’t quite remember who he was.
The night before they are due to leave, Jessie and Lux decide to sneak out and have a night on the town. They go to a dance club, do drugs, and stay out into the morning hours at Jessie’s insistence. There’s a moment when Jessie stops in front of a set of train tracks and stares off into them, and Wollner’s film is full of these subtle moments that may not seem to mean anything at the time, but “Everytime” plays with synchronicity across characters in different moments. What seems like a serene, warm admiration of the sunrise on a rooftop morphs into a shocking tragedy. Jessie falls to her death, and Gregory Oke’s camera immediately moves throughout the town as if it never happened. While the town itself moves forward, the three characters are forever out of step with the regular hustle and bustle because of this loss.
Some time passes, and the next time we see Ella is when she is visiting Jessie’s grave, which has become routine. Lux leaves town briefly but returns with a new girlfriend whom Ella meets at one point. He has not visited Jessie’s gravesite and has not felt the full weight of losing his ex-girlfriend. At one point, Lux does bring himself to listen to old voicenotes and look through the last photos she ever took of them together. Melli often looks through old messages from Jessie and even texts emojis to it, hoping for a reply.
Eventually, the three who have retreated to their respective corners of melancholy begin to converge into a single entity. Lux becomes a de facto sibling to Melli and a younger grief-in-arms companion to Ella — which means the three attend birthday parties and contentious family dinners together. A heavy, unspoken guilt resides within Lux, and a night spent sleeping in Ella’s house, surrounded by Jessie’s belongings, elicits an intense emotional response from him. Wollner is less concerned with delivering the bluntness of blame than with exploring how these characters exist within their own world, because loss is unique to those in close proximity to it.
Is it possible that the objects and the places that the deceased obtained or occupied contain an energy that we can unknowingly trigger? Wollner plays with this hope cleverly throughout the film. At one point, it appears someone is typing back to Melli through Jessie’s phone. A drone unsuspectingly appears in front of Ella and leads her into a garage. “Everytime” neither confirms nor denies, and that theme takes it into a dreamy third act that will be open to many interpretations. We now live in an infrastructure where it’s possible to paper over death with digital avatars and chatbots that try to draw up a schematic of who a person was based on the information we feed them. It’s a husk, a hollow shell that resembles the person we knew, like a mask. If we wanted to, we could elect to pacify and not allow our imaginations to wrestle with what could have been — a far harder, but braver journey.
The amazing thing that Wollner does with “Everytime” is to say that uncertainty of what comes after is not only essential, but necessary. The film is the grainy VHS tape of first-grade milestones, a living monument, and an abstract art painting asking to be discussed and dissected within the same. “Everytime” asks us to sit with the anxious feeling of permanence and allow it to reveal that it could teach us the value of combining our imaginations not to forget sorrow, but to live with it.
“Everytime was reviewed at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival”
