The latest winner of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard slot, Everytime, arrives as a quietly ferocious meditation on loss. German filmmaker Sandra Wollner brings together a mother (Birgit Minichmayr), her surviving little sister (Lotte Shirin Keiling) and a teenage boyfriend (Tristán López) to navigate the void left by teenage Jessie (Carla Hüttermann). The narrative unfolds a year after the tragedy, allowing the characters to settle into an uneasy rhythm of remembrance and tentative forward motion.
From the opening moments, Wollner signals that traditional melodrama will not dominate the frame. Instead, she layers in footage from the indie sandbox Vintage Story, a game whose blocky terrains and ambient soundscapes echo the film’s own aesthetic. “Maybe if someone hears the dialogue of Melli and Lux, then maybe they would feel they have to know more about it,” Wollner told IndieWire, underscoring that the game is a decorative layer, not a prerequisite for comprehension. The result is a story that feels simultaneously grounded in reality and adrift in a minimalist, digital universe.
Grief as an Elastic Narrative Form
At its core, Everytime is a study of how grief stretches, contracts, and reshapes lives. The film’s logline reads simply: after Jessie’s death, her mother Ella, sister Melli, and boyfriend Lux form an unlikely family unit and attempt to move on. By setting the bulk of the drama twelve months after the accident, Wollner sidesteps the “raw shock” phase and instead concentrates on the quieter, lingering ache that persists long after the headline grief has faded. “The feeling that I wanted to have is that … you walk around the corner and you feel still some ground, but it’s such an odd place now and you don’t know,” she explained, describing the film’s tonal pivot from familiar sorrow to an unsettling new equilibrium.
Wollner’s directorial restraint shines through the performances. Minichmayr and López avoid theatrical outbursts, letting small gestures—an absent-minded phone swipe, a half-spoken apology—communicate the weight of their loss. Keiling, playing Melli, brings a child’s curiosity rather than melodramatic sobbing, reinforcing Wollner’s belief that “the film itself, the editing and the framing, the absence, will tell us the grief.” This approach transforms the conventional grieving-family story into a series of delicate moments that accumulate into an emotional crescendo.
Digital Mementos and the Memory of Avatars
The integration of Vintage Story is not a gimmick; it serves as a metaphor for how modern societies memorialize the departed. Wollner noted, “We have this whole world of avatars and gaming communities where people meet online and then if someone really goes out, their avatar might live forever in there and create a life on its own.” By allowing Melli to occupy Jessie’s in-game character, the film proposes a new kind of memorial—one that persists in pixels after flesh has faded. This concept resonates especially in an era where digital legacies outlive physical ones.
While the game footage is visually striking, the real emotional anchor appears during the family’s holiday to Tenerife, Spain. The trio discovers a baby that resembles Jessie in a quiet resort lounge, a scene that triggered Wollner’s own parental instincts while editing. “I always understood what that scene means for me, but there, we really felt it for the first time, being a parent,” she confessed. The Tenerife setting becomes a liminal space where past and present blur, echoing the film’s recurring reminder that memory can surface in the most ordinary corners—a “banal little room with a kitschy toy playing music” that haunts Ella, Melli and Lux.
Crafting a Visual and Sonic Language of Distance
One of the film’s most arresting moments is the depiction of Jessie’s fatal fall. Wollner chose a 3,000-mm lens to film from a half-mile away, creating a perspective that feels both intimate and impossibly remote: “It’s like you don’t want to point it on people. It feels really not OK.” The actors performed on a separate high-rise, while safety rigs and studio-shot footage were later composited by visual effects supervisor Kariem Saleh. This technical decision mirrors the thematic distance the characters feel—close enough to mourn, yet forever apart.
Sound design received equal obsessiveness. Wollner recounted “working so many hours just on the sounds, just to get the right level of there is a little sound, and there is a little tink when she falls down.” The muted thud, barely audible over the ambient wind, lands in the Cannes auditorium like a physical jolt. When she finally heard the audience’s gasp, she said it “went through my bones.” This meticulous auditory layering reinforces the film’s dual obsession with what is seen and what is felt, underscoring the idea that grief is as much an internal echo as an external event.
