Everyone 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‘s shattered, piercing family study “Everytime,” until the present loops back on the past entirely, and which (or whose) reality we’re 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’s third feature felt like the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year’s Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, and duly won the top prize there.
That win will ensure healthy arthouse distribution for this outwardly challenging but emotionally involving work which will certainly see more theatrical play than Wollner’s name-making previous film, the startling 2020 sci-fi drama “The Trouble With Being Born.” That film’s prospects were curtailed by the pandemic, certainly, but also by its confronting, controversial premise, involving a childlike AI android sexually abused by its creator. “Everytime” isn’t nearly as blatant a provocation, though it confirms Wollner’s 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 — this time in collaboration with ace “Aftersun” cinematographer Gregory Oke, clearly the man to call if you need an all-inclusive coastal resort suffused with soul-bleaching light and creeping dread.
It’s on the eve of a family vacation to one such place in Tenerife that Berlin teenager Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) steals away for a blissed-out evening with her boyfriend Lux (Tristan Lopez) — a leisurely few hours of aimless ambling and circular conversation that plays out in a manner reminiscent of German auteur Angela Schanelec’s semi-surreal walking-and-talking features, further fuzzed by the addition of whatever drugs Lux has at his disposal.
To 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 — shot by Oke with the camera in wide, sweeping flight, following Jessie’s gaze on a loosely soaring bird before slowly traveling back to find her body in silent freefall — is the first of Wollner’s gasp-inducing cinematic coups, executed with such nonchalant candor that you briefly don’t trust your eyes.
A year or so later, Jessie’s single mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr, “Everyone Else”) and younger sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) are doing their best to carry on as a family of two, incorporating regular maintenance of Jessie’s grave into their routine of mundane chores and outings. But it’s 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’s phone, and spends hours playing a “Minecraft”-style 8-bit video game that rearranges the irregular world around her into comfortingly exact geometric shapes. That’s a realm the film itself dives into for extended, immersive and blearily entrancing interludes — a gateway into its eventual, more drastic breakdown of rational reality, controlled by one player’s will.
Lux, 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’s 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’s in the final third — as the three take the vacation that was canceled by Jessie’s death — that “Everytime” 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.
It’s 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 “Everytime” 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’s the film’s 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, “Everytime” remains deeply, legibly and sometimes overwhelmingly felt.
