Reading that, you may think the film is grandiose by nature, drilling down into some of life’s most challenging sentiments. And you wouldn’t be inherently wrong, but that’s where this movie stands apart. Certainly from every movie at the New York Film Festival, but also every movie made this year. Perhaps, even this decade. It recedes into the glowing sun of those very vast feelings, letting them wash over not only the characters and the story on the screen, but the viewer.

There’s nothing too distinct about Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), a middle-aged mom, and her two daughters, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), a teenager always eyeballing privacy, and Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), a ten-year-old continuously in her sister’s space. A walk home from school talking about dinner plans is one of the very first sequences we are brought into. It’s normal. Jessie and Melli playfully bicker about how they don’t want what the other wants for dinner, and Ella just listens. It’s a patient, comforting scene that takes its time. The warm glow of the Berlin afternoon shining through the skybridge they walk across combines with the many sounds – birds chirping, wind blowing, an ominous pop from the distance – to give birth to an “everyday.. It’s nothing special, really. But it also is really special.

Once home, Jessie’s boyfriend Lux (Tristán López) comes over to work on homework with her. Melli can’t help herself. She invades her room, insisting they both listen to her play the keyboard. Their lives are intertwined, for better and worse, like any growing sisters may be. That evening, the night before they are slated to go on a family trip to Tenerife that has long been promised but never materialized, Melli crawls onto the same couch where Jessie is playing “Minecraft.”

Here Wollner makes one of her distinct, yet imperative decisions: to engulf the entire frame of the film in the 32-bit essence of the world-building game. The perception between the reality of here and now overlaps with the technological space in which characters can float, fly, and finagle their way to just about anywhere. At any time. Jessie leaves the controller with her sister, opting to sneak off with Lux. They embark on an evening of clubbing and pills, only to find themselves high above the Berlin skyline on a rooftop at sunrise.

It’s at this moment that one of the most visually arresting scenes of the year blossoms. In Jessie’s fascination with capturing the beauty around her, she falls off the building. Nothing changes: the city still wakes up, the sounds of the world around still persist. Yet, everything changes in that moment. Both in and outside of the film, it’s a pivotal shift that helps Everytime enter a liminal space between love and grief, between space and time.

Shot by cinematographer Gregory Oke, who also framed Aftersun (2022), the film takes a stance to capture a life remembered, mostly in long, lived-in sequences. Months have passed, and Ella is taking a work call at Jessie’s grave, signaling the first of Wollner’s many tangents explored regarding how we grieve in a modern society. Melli still texts Jessie with mostly emojis, firing off something somber or even silly when she feels that she needs to tell her sister something. Everytime presses forward, just as life, with notable events here and there – Lux comes back from a summer abroad to find himself gravitating toward spending more time with Ella and Milli, and they finally go on that long-awaited vacation to Tenerife.

Here, everything changes. Everytime passes through the so-called veil of a grounded reality to that of hope, sadness, and, of course, memory. Wollner pulls off a masterful balancing act, especially in the third act, where the film doesn’t directly ask the questions so many other movies of its kind do. Instead, it lives in the answers without even whispering the questions, because we, as the audience, feel the questions. Nearly every frame of the final act could be a still painting, imbuing every single brushstroke with beauty in both the visual and emotional sense. Not to mention the video game-esque synth score from a triad of composers (Timm Kröger, Peter Kutin, and David Schweighart) that draws the film further into its ghostly state of being.

Hannes Bruun, the editor, instills a magical layering of multimedia recognition throughout the film constantly – video games, camcorders, voice memos, cell phone texts, still photographs – that acts as an anchor of what the movie is so very interested in. As time changes, and as the technology around us evolves, so does the way we interact with the memories of those we love. Even now, existing in a future in which AI is being used to resurrect generations-dead family members, the navigation is unclear. There is no clear linear or moral path for experiencing grief. 

The idea of an afterlife is one of personal belief (I do in fact believe our presence echoes in reality long after our corporeal forms have decayed), and one Sandra Wollner dances around, and with, exquisitely. Grief and love are intrinsically intertwined in how we live life every single day, especially after the loss of a loved one. Life is never quite as clear after, seemingly entering a new plane in which the sun never looks the same again. Everytime knows that. And revels in that. And, beautifully, transcends that.

Coverage as part of NYFF64. Learn more about the film festival here.

Review Courtesy of Ethan Simmie

Feature Image Courtesy of NYFF64