Everytime

Still part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

EVERYTIME   ****

Sandra Wollner

2026

IDEA:  The loss of a young woman sends her mother, sister, and boyfriend on a journey that blurs space and time.

BLURB:  More and more, we live in a virtual world as much as a material one. This is the weightless universe of pictures, video games, memes, sounds and music, disembodied conversations and peregrinations, memories, and fantasies, of frequently voluptuous experiences facilitated by that flattest of interfaces: the digital screen. Sandra Wollner’s spellbindingly mercurial Everytime breaks that screen, quite literally, letting the real and virtual flow into each other like all that water rippling through the frame. Wollner, DP Gregory Oke, and editor Hannes Bruun execute visual sleights-of-hand so dexterous you’re constantly doing double takes. The blocky environment of a Minecraft-like video game transitions into a dark bedroom where the only legible shapes are faint gray rectangles, as if the room has itself become pixelated. A drone hovers in front of a bewildered woman before taking off down a tunnel, and then we switch to its POV, soaring into a void and then rewinding itself back to the encounter. In Everytime’s most staggering shot, a telephoto lens slowly homes in on a couple on the roof of a Berlin apartment building in the pink-purple haze of sunrise, and then pans away to another building to witness a shocking incident. Or is it the same building? And who’s witnessing it? The film is marked by echoes and recursions, by the déjà vu of seeing something from a movie replayed before you in real life, and by the 21st-century condition of being the perceiver in front of your screen and the perceived behind someone else’s. Wollner translates this condition into a kind of ghost story, in which the existence of a deceased young woman lingers in the technology that so copiously recorded it, prone to be taken up by her family and friends at later times and in different places. The grief that courses through Everytime, rarely spoken but so fulsomely communicated in the performances of Birgit Minichmayr, Lotte Shirin Keiling, and Tristán López, is not merely about loss but imperfect access: longing for memories you’ll never have and experiences that can never be the same again. Wollner finds possibilities in technology — in cinema — that temporarily transcend such stubborn rules. Through her screen, as coruscating as the sun, we can experience every time, at the same time, if only for a time.