A shattering portrait of grief that refuses to play by the rules. This year’s winner of the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Everytime is Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner's most precise and emotionally devastating work yet.
The film showcases Wollner’s talent for injecting genuine unease into ordinary events.
Everytime 2026
A Berlin-based family comprising teenage Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), her mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) and sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) are about to go on holiday in Tenerife when Jessie sneaks out for a night of partying with her boyfriend Lux (Tristan Lopez) which ends in tragedy. Sandra Wollner’s lyrical gut-punch of a film doesn’t ease its audience gradually into its world: Wollner immerses us in the family’s day-to-day life before swiftly upending it within the first 15 minutes.
Life after Jessie dies can never truly be the same for Ella and Melli, and yet in many ways it is. It has to be, the daily routine is all they have. At the same time, it is like they have slipped into another dimension, where minor occurrences acquire a freighted sense of significance.
It would be easy to reach for the term ‘magical realism’ in describing the film’s climax, but the precise internal logic of Wollner’s film elevates it above so much of what is meant by that term. Here, the impossible appears to occur, but with a grounded psychological precision that more than earns the break with reality and means that the film’s carefully established realism is deepened – reaching almost unbearable levels of emotional resonance, rather than undermined.
– Catherine Bray, Screen Daily