In Everytime, a sun-dappled film about death and love that might be the best in Cannes this year, the terrible loss of a teenage girl’s life leaves her mother, younger sister, and boyfriend bound in mutual devastation. Set in present-day East Berlin during the balmy months of the year, this is a film that appears at first to be drawn from the same Berlin School approach as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanalec, but there’s little of that cohort’s minimalism or literary melancholy here. No need to know that the DP is Gregory Oke for one’s mind to gradually wander to Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun—another movie about how the worst things still manage to happen regardless of the weather.
Everytime (even that compounded title has a Wellsian flicker to it) is directed by Sandra Wollner, a ruminative Austrian filmmaker who examined the aftermath of losing a child in her sophomore feature The Trouble with Being Born, though where that harrowing nightmare of a film suggested Spielberg’s A.I. via Ulrich Seidl, her latest—with its leafy, Lichtenberg setting and lilting piano score by David Schweighart—is closer to a waking dream. If you saw that earlier film at the 2020 Berlinale or elsewhere and have been steeling yourself in nervous anticipation for what Wollner would come up with next, the writer-director has delivered a minor-chord triumph that finds warmth in some of the places where Born found only biting misery.
The story begins in the days leading up to a family holiday that will see single mom Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) and her two daughters, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) and Mellie (Lotte Keiling), travel to a hotel in Tenerife where Ella and Jessie’s father went when the girl was still an infant. On the night before they’re set to leave, Jessie sneaks out with her boyfriend Lux (Tristan López) to a party in the forest, which leads to a sunrise comedown and tragic fall. In the aftermath, the remaining trio becomes witnesses to each other’s grief, staying close as if in the hope of catching the absent girl’s reflected glow. They scroll through photos, reread messages, and revisit fateful places, up to and including retracing the steps (and drug intake) of her last day on earth, then traveling again to the same hotel in Tenerife that Ella and Jessie visited all those years ago. While on that distant island, those glimmers begin to play tricks with the light and perhaps their minds. It’s probably best we leave it there.
For Oke’s particular genius, watching some scenes that he and Wollner concoct here (and the clearly defined and complementary counterpoint to their approaches) only left me more perplexed that this is only his first feature since arriving with Wells in 2022. In the first of Everytime‘s key transcendental sequences, the camera locates Jessie and Lux on the top of an apartment block amongst the Berlin skyline before being distracted by the flight of a bird; in the second, Lux is again captured from a distance, this time as he takes a cathartic swim in a canal that beautifully reflects the evening sky; but, best of all, the third arrives in Wollner’s sublime closing, where the film takes plenty of swings—allusions to Minecraft and a scene in Under the Skin, a VanderMeer-coded lighthouse, some distant Chris Marker-like narration—but comes out the other end intact, if not fully reborn. Would it have been too much for her to call this film The Trouble with Being Alive?
Given the lukewarm response to some of this year’s Cannes selections, I have to imagine Everytime had at least an outside shot of making the competition, and that, given the opportunity in a few years, they’re unlikely to make the same mistake twice. Introducing the premiere, Wollner stated that her only hope was for the audience to let it sit with them a while, but she probably didn’t need ask. This is a film that lingers in the bloodstream, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Everytime premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
The post Cannes Review: Sandra Wollner Meets the Moment With Sublime Everytime first appeared on The Film Stage.
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