ⓒCourtesy of The New York Film Festival
The most influential psychologically intimate films begin with the deceptive familiarity of close relationships. They eventually go on to reveal how grief and memory can gradually destabilize people’s sense of reality. The new drama, Everytime, does just that with its character-driven, observational story. The movie quietly infuses a sense of instability beneath the ordinary domestic life of a mother and her two daughters. As a result, the story creates the impression that something in their lives is about to shift.
Austrian filmmaker, Sandra Wollner wrote and directed Everytime. Her atmospheric new drama follows her sci-fi-driven breakthrough feature The Trouble with Being Born. Like her previous movie, her latest project is an uncanny, mesmerizing descent into the suspended, destabilizing aftermath of grief.
Wollner immerses the story in a different sort of reality bending in Everytime. The story follows Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), a teenage girl who experiences a shocking accident in Berlin. After the accident, her mother, Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), younger sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) and boyfriend (Tristan López) drift into a state of suspended grief. As the family contends with its sorrow, they embark to the Spanish island of Tenerife. They hope the long-anticipated family vacation will help them heal, but it ultimately questions their realities.
ⓒCourtesy of The New York Film Festival
When tragedy arrives, Everytime does not follow the expected path toward acceptance, healing, or emotional resolution. Instead, Wollner uses grief to fracture the characters’ relationship with time, memory, and reality. The result is a moving and increasingly uncanny film that becomes more daring precisely as its emotional stakes deepen.
The tragedy at the center of Everytime changes the survivors’ emotions without completely changing their daily routines. Ella and Melli still have to wake up, eat, move through familiar spaces and continue with the practical routines of ordinary life. That contradiction becomes one of the film’s most affecting ideas: the world continues even when a person’s internal sense of reality has been permanently altered.
Wollner avoids turning grief into a sequence of conventional stages, and there is no easy promise that time will simply make the pain disappear. Instead, Everytime understands mourning as an experience that can make the everyday strangely unfamiliar. A room, a conversation or an empty space can suddenly carry the emotional weight of a memory. In that sense, the drma finds its greatest power in showing how absence can become a presence of its own.
Wollner’s manipulation of time is central to this effect. Everytime initially establishes a relatively straightforward chronology, allowing viewers to settle into the family’s routines before gradually destabilizing that confidence. Past and present begin to overlap, and memories seem less like neatly contained recollections than experiences capable of intruding upon the present.
The movie’s structure consequently reflects how grief can make time feel strangely elastic. A recent event may feel impossibly distant, while an earlier moment can suddenly become vivid enough to seem as though it is happening again. Wollner transforms that subjective experience into cinematic form. Rather than simply stating that grief distorts time, Everytime embraces that distortion.
That approach also allows the film to explore memory without reducing it to a reliable record of what happened. Memories can preserve emotional truths while simultaneously becoming fragmented, selective or dreamlike.
The story embraces the gap between remembering an experience and actually returning to it. As the film progresses, that gap becomes increasingly difficult to define. The viewer is encouraged to question whether certain images belong to memory, imagination, reality or some combination of all three.
This uncertainty never feels like an empty puzzle designed simply to confuse. Instead, Everytime uses ambiguity to express something deeply recognizable about mourning: when someone is gone, the mind continually attempts to restore a connection that reality can no longer provide.
Gregory Oke’s cinematography is essential to this transformation. His camerawork frequently observes the characters from a remarkable distance, allowing buildings, streets, landscapes and empty spaces to become almost as important as the people occupying them.
Oke’s compositions possess a quiet beauty, but they also create an unusual sense of vulnerability. People can appear tiny against their surroundings, as though the world has suddenly become too large for them. As Everytime moves further into its surreal territory, that visual strategy becomes increasingly dreamlike.
The cinematography also contributes to the movie’s distinctive manipulation of perspective. Oke doesn’t always position the camera where a conventional dramatic film might place it, and this restraint makes seemingly ordinary images feel mysterious.
A distant building, an empty landscape or an isolated figure can acquire an almost supernatural quality without any obvious visual effects. The effect is especially powerful because Everytime has already trained the viewer to trust its naturalistic visual language. When that language begins to change, the shift registers emotionally before it becomes intellectually clear. Oke’s work therefore becomes an extension of Wollner’s exploration of memory and perception.
Keiling gives Everytime another important source of emotional authenticity as Melli. Her performance captures a young person caught between understanding loss and being unable to fully comprehend its consequences.
ⓒCourtesy of The New York Film Festival
Melli doesn’t behave like a conventional cinematic representation of a grieving child, and the acttress wisely avoids turning her into a symbol of innocence or suffering. Instead, she feels observant, awkward, vulnerable and convincingly young. Her reactions often communicate more through silence and small changes in behavior than through explicit declarations. As the story unfolds, Keiling’s grounded presence provides an important emotional anchor. Her performance helps Everytime retain its connection to the recognizable human experience beneath its increasingly uncanny surface.
The film’s treatment of grief is particularly effective because composer David Schweighart’s score complements Melli and her family’s emotional uncertainty. The music contributes to the film’s atmosphere of suspended reality. Its presence can make ordinary scenes feel subtly removed from everyday life, particularly as the narrative begins to move away from conventional realism.
The soundscape and score work alongside Oke’s images to create a world that feels recognizable but slightly displaced. Production design by Julia Libiseller and Gerald Freimuth similarly strengthens that sensation by grounding the movie in believable environments while allowing those environments to acquire an uncanny quality. Everytime repeatedly demonstrates how familiar spaces can become foreign when viewed through grief.
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Ultimately, Everytime is a remarkable example of how form can express emotion more powerfully than exposition. Wollner doesn’t simply tell a story about people struggling with loss; she constructs a cinematic experience in which time becomes unstable, memory becomes tangible and reality gradually loses its fixed boundaries. Oke’s distant, increasingly dreamlike photography gives the drama its haunting visual identity, while Keiling portrays Melli with a quietly powerful authenticity. The score, production design, performances and carefully controlled pacing all contribute to a world that feels simultaneously intimate and otherworldly.
The greatest strength of Everytime is that its surrealism never diminishes its humanity. If anything, the movie’s increasingly uncanny qualities allow Wollner to approach grief from a more intimate angle than conventional realism might permit.
The film understands that mourning can make yesterday feel present, make familiar places feel strange and make memories seem almost physically accessible. Instead of promising that the characters will eventually return to the lives they had before their loss, Everytime accepts that some experiences permanently alter people’s relationship with reality. It’s a beautifully controlled, emotionally resonant drama that grows stranger without becoming less sincere. By the conclusion, the movie has transformed a family story into a haunting meditation on how people remember, perceive, and continue living after loss.
Overall: A-
Everytime will have its U.S. Premiere in the Main Slate section at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) on September 29, 2026. The drama’s screening at NYFF comes after it won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Prize. The movie is Germany’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards.