Everytime Review: Remembrance of Things Past

Everytime captures the strangeness of the grieving process with empathy, skill and incredible grace. One of the year’s best films.

The camera can’t initially register what is happening, and therein lies the point. In this brutal moment, Everytime reminds us that no matter how we choose to deal with the inevitable, it will happen anyway, and often by surprise.

The poor soul that falls is Jessie (Carla Hüttermann). In Everytime’s prologue, we get to see her as a typical 16-year-old girl. She’s bright and optimistic, occasionally at odds with her family, but finding solace in socialising with her boyfriend Lux (Tristán López). The power of the film emanates from the moment of Jessie’s death, as three people attempt to move on from it with varying degrees of success and residual grief. Jumping ahead to one year later, Lux returns from a scholarship abroad, but when he crosses paths with Jessie’s mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) and younger sister Melli (Lotte Keiling), it stirs up emotions in all three that were necessarily sublimated. Thus begins a necessary journey for all three to assist with each other’s pain.

Everytime might sound like any other movie that deals with the psychic wounds of trauma, but Wollner understands that the path to reconciliation with the past is neither straightforward nor easy. The impressionistic structure reflects this messiness, as the central trio struggle to find the closure they so desperately need. Visits to Jessie’s grave and recollections of her life can’t hide that Lux is fragile, Ella is increasingly immature, and Melli is retreating into the virtual world of her mobile phone and video games. Familiar patterns of temporary placation endear the trio to the audience, as each one works through their grief in their own way, and at their own speed.

That awareness, of the subjectivity and messiness of grief, is Everytime’s trump card. Each character, and everyone watching them, experiences loss in their own way. Acknowledging this fact allows Wollner to explore subjectivity in fascinating and relevant ways. Technology plays a strange but interesting part in the characters’ post-traumatic ordeals. They watch old videos of Jessie to keep her memory alive, but Melli starts to lose herself in her Minecraft-esque video games, while she texts Jessie’s mobile in a futile attempt to bridge the gap between living and dead. In a chilling moment, Melli sees someone begin to respond to her latest text. Everytime is studded with little moments like this; they weaponise the inexplicable nature of death to probe at our individual fears and doubts.

The idea that Jessie could be on the other end of the message is an active nod to the ghostly goings-on of Assayas’ Personal Shopper, wherein some form of spectre stalks Kristen Stewart via SMS. Besides being an excellent reference point, it locates Everytime in a very specific type of filmic experience of grief. Where genre filmmaking often functions as a metaphor for various traumas, Wollner’s movie joins a brave band of works that tackle it head-on. The fragmentation of the narrative and the character perspectives is most redolent of Malick’s The Tree of Life, where a man and his childhood self attempt to reconcile themselves to the forces that made them what they are. 

As Lux, Melli and Ella continue to seek relief from their loss, they arrange to go to Tenerife for the last summer holiday Jessie never got to take. The new setting brings all of them to the brink of their patience, but all three leads shine under the pressure. Relative newcomers Keiling and López bear the burden of their characters’ pain with realism and tenderness, while veteran Minichmayr hints at Ella’s sense of loss subtly, even when her behaviour becomes more immature. Like Delphine in Rohmer’s The Green Ray, all of them are searching for the closure of a sunset, only to find that their sadness can’t be washed away in a moment of grace.

Everytime’s exploration of regret earns it comparisons to Aftersun, with the various character viewpoints taking the place of the camcorder through which the young lead of Charlotte Welles’ film filtered her recollections of her father. In Wollner’s view, we experience our pain in any number of ways, and all are valid if they offer comfort. Aftersun’s cinematographer Gregory Oke gives Wollner’s movie a haunting light. The nights are never dark enough to be overwhelming, and the days bask in a sunny haze that warms and reassures. Everytime doesn’t manifest any ghosts or concrete ideas of an afterlife, but Jessie is always with those who miss her.

The final act of Everytime blurs the line between past and present, and reality and memory, in ways that some may find too literal, if not nonsensical, but which make sense in the context of the sheer weirdness of the grieving process. Everytime is a rare acknowledgement of just how bizarre the processing of trauma can be, and allows its characters to work it out best they can without judgement. It is a film of remarkable empathy and profound confidence. 

Everytime was screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October, 16-17, 2026. The film will be released in 2027.