Everytime
The German film Everytime was honored at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as a distinctive, innovative work of art. It’s also Germany’s official submission to the International Feature Film category at next year’s Academy Awards
Written and directed by Sandra Wollner, Everytime is a haunting, deeply felt meditation on grief—in this case a death in the family. I want to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible since much of the film’s power lies in the experience of discovering the rhythms of its complex story for yourself.
The image is dreamlike…and ushers us through a door that leads to the surreal maze of heartache that is this movie’s gold.
From the moment that we meet Ella, the mother, Jessie her teenage daughter, and Melli, her younger daughter, there’s a sense of unease stalking them as they make their way through what appears to be an otherwise calm, typical day. Ella makes dinner as Melli whines that Jessie is being mean to her. Jessie struggles to be alone with her boyfriend Lux and study with him without Melli always interrupting them. And then tragedy strikes. The image that captures this moment is dreamlike, upsetting, and ushers us through a door that leads to the surreal maze of heartache that is this movie’s gold.
As the characters who remain struggle to carry on with ordinary life, a tide of logic-free magic realism drifts into the story as the family takes a healing, seaside vacation. It’s there while dealing with their sorrow that the family encounters a startling convergence of their grief-driven hopes and fears. At the water’s edge, in a stunning sequence, they find what may be an imagined reunion with the spirits of the dead. Or is it a tear in the fabric of another space-time continuum, where making contact with their loss is real?
With striking, poetic imagery and poignant, psychological shading, Everytime is a slow-burn, unsettling journey; an unforgettable one, really. You don’t watch it as much as feel it pierce the skin of a family’s devastating, painful loss and then somehow still help them find hope for the future. I give it four out of four stars.
