Grief has a way of fracturing reality. Time slows down, memories blur, and sometimes it feels like the impossible can happen in this nightmare place. After all, unexpected death, especially that of a child, breaks the fabric of the way things should be. Sandra Wollner’s captivating “Everytime” spends time in this unfathomably painful space before using filmmaking to rupture it even further. This film first nods to the incongruity of life lived in the shadow of grief before pushing into a more surreal cinematic language, driven by the emotional logic of its characters rather than their reality. Grief can break the world open. Few films have ever portrayed that more memorably.
When Wollner’s film opens, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) and Lux (Tristán López) are ordinary German teenagers, helping each other with homework in the room that Jessie shares with her younger sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling). They talk about a trip they plan to take soon with Jessie & Melli’s mother, Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), and about living what seem like ordinary lives. But Wollner’s camera, orchestrated by the incredible Gregory Oke (who also gave “Aftersun” a similar sun-kissed dream language), gives even these early scenes an unexpected rhythm. For example, a shot on a closed door is held longer than normal while outdoor scenes are shot from a distance, amplifying how small these people are in the world.
And then it happens. The specifics won’t be spoiled here because it’s such a gasp-inducing moment, but let’s just say that Jessie is there one minute and quite literally gone the next, stranding the other main characters in three kinds of grief: That of a friend, a mother, and a sister. Wollner’s script skips over all the expected melodramatic events after the inciting incident, plunging us into that grief quicksand where life has to go on even when you feel like you can’t move. Lux has a girlfriend, Ella has to make dinner, Melli is still as ordinary a kid as she can be. One day, Ella tells them to pack—they’re taking the trip to Tenerife.
There have been a number of films recently about the anxious reality that young people live in today, films about not just the ripple effect of loss but the uncertain world that derails so many traditional coming-of-age arcs. Both Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s excellent “Mouse,” in theaters, and the equally excellent “La Gradiva,” coming soon, play with these ideas. Screenwriters have been unpacking the impact of grief for generations, but these in-theater projects share a common interest in how the sudden loss of young people can tilt the Earth on its axis.
Wollner’s is the most surreal take, eventually embracing a sort of dream logic that’s drawn comparisons to Olivier Assayas’ masterful “Personal Shopper.” Whereas that Kristen Stewart movie was more directly supernatural in a way that could almost classify it as horror, this one is more interested in the perception and even the isolation of grief. Anyone who has experienced heartbreaking loss will relate to the idea that it can make you feel alone even in a crowded space.
Wollner and Oke play with space throughout “Everytime” in consistently fascinating ways. The apartment where much of the drama takes place is intentionally confined and almost claustrophobic, in contrast to the open, sun-drenched spaces of Tenerife; yet the latter can feel equally lonely, and sometimes is quite literally so, as if the world has left these characters behind. Oke has several shots in Tenerife of the sun setting over the water that feel like they’re almost too good to be created by Mother Nature: Waves of yellow and orange washing and reflecting off the water.
While the first hour of “Everytime” unfolds like a relatively traditional but well-made study in grief, it’s the reshaping of reality in its final act that makes this film special. Wollner and Oke use visual language to say more than melodramatic monologues possibly could, revealing again how the world can feel like it’s echoing and spinning when grief becomes the overriding emotion. There is no way back, only a path through, and that path might lead to a place that doesn’t look like where you are now.
It makes you think about the title. Does it mean that grief shatters people “every time”? Or is it something deeper about how grief can fold memory, the past, and the future in on each other, pushing every time into one painful space? This is the kind of movie that gets people asking questions not only about how we heal but how these themes can be captured on film with visual language instead of exposition or even dialogue. If a lot of filmmakers are asking questions about grief in 2026, Wollner is smart enough to know she doesn’t have all of the answers, only the compassion to ask them in a new way.
