Sandra Wollner’s ‘Everytime’ Considers the Afterlife in Digital Memory

The German entry to this year’s Academy Awards, Sandra Wollner’s beguiling family drama Everytime, is bookended by tremendously powerful explorations of images, mood and an attraction to oblivion—sensations which make its meandering interim entirely worthwhile. Haunting and self-assured, the movie’s gradual unspooling wraps its tale of sudden tragedy within uncanny digital fabrics, as Wollner’s steady camera traverses down strange paths of memory and modern ghosts in machines. This reveals an astonishing complexity to what is, on the surface, an incredibly simple story.

It begins with a German family of three: single mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), thoughtful teenager Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) and spry adolescent Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling). Their conversations are straightforward and unassuming, surrounding the subject of the two sisters sharing a room and the family’s upcoming vacation to Tenerife. However, Wollner and cinematographer Gregory Oke capture them at an observational distance, practically surveilling them as strange sounds from somewhere off-screen—perhaps even behind the camera—occasionally distract Jessie and draw her gaze.

You’d think nothing of it, but it happens several times, even as Jessie sneaks out to a drug-fueled techno rave with her boyfriend Lux (Tristán López), and hangs out with him the next morning on a Berlin rooftop—a place which proves tragic for the young couple, when Jessie plummets to her death. Something is amiss in the young girl’s reality, as it relates to the movie’s fiction, which makes her sudden, seemingly accidental demise all the more mysterious. It’s hard not to wonder who or what she’d seen when she fell off the aforementioned precipice, as Lux was asleep beside her. However, this conversation is one for us, the audience, to meaningfully parse, rather than for the characters. They don’t seem to have the language or the emotional tools.

The next time Ella and Melli run into Lux, some time has passed, and they’ve maintained a genial relationship, even though there’s some residual blame and resentment. This comes frothing slowly to the surface when the trio decides to embark on the same Tenerife excursion they’d originally planned with Jessie before she died, forcing lingering feelings out in the open amid the setting summer sun. However, the drama in Everytime is far more oblique and abstract than it initially seems, owing to the numerous digital photographs and old MiniDV videos of Jessie the characters reflect on after the fact, as though some element of her spirit were preserved through digital imprint.

After a while, Ella even begins retracing her daughter’s steps and observing strange things in the ether, and in empty spaces, much like Jessie did. It’s as though both mother and daughter were within mere inches of piercing some veil of existence—or in this case, some veil of fiction. Our modern world is one of digital artifice, and the film itself is, after all, a digital artifact as well. Its confines have been designed to house the living and the dead alike, in Wollner’s self-reflexive inquiry into questions humanity has been asking since its inception.

“What lies beyond?” No one knows the answer. But the query has become infinitely more complex in a society of ones and zeros, where people leave behind mysterious reflections through everything from home videos to open-world games like Minecraft—a world of blocks and monuments Jessie meticulously carved when alive, and which the film occasionally revisits in surprising ways, buoyed by a haunting electronic score.

Just as surprising is Wollner’s subtle game of hopscotch around the line between fiction and reality, which she treats as a boundary between life and the afterlife, albeit through an atheistic lens. When faced with questions of infinity, even skeptics can understand why people have long been drawn to religious notions. In their absence, all we’re left with for comfort is handprints pressed into digital concrete, placing Everytime firmly alongside films like Aftersun in their exploration of human memory as a living fabric in the information age.

In the movie’s final act, Wollner confronts these notions head-on in overwhelming, self-reflexive ways, making the film a fitting companion to some other great works from this year. Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva, and Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Mouse all similarly deal with young lives cut short, and the imprints they leave behind; their totality reflects a nihilistic generation forced to reckon with a world whose possibilities seem increasingly hopeless. And yet, each one eventually enters a phase of spiritual recursion (some more literally than others), as their respective filmmakers luxuriate in the discomforts of grief and nihilism, and in the process, reach a place of deep catharsis the longer they wade.

Everytime, which is scheduled for a limited theatrical release in the United States on Nov. 6-12, is no exception. By the time it pulls back the curtain on its particular, peculiar view of death, its razor-thin margin between wish fulfillment and coping mechanism becomes intrinsically understood. There’s dialogue aplenty, much of it familiar and comfortable, but Wollner doesn’t need words when her camera so confidently and radiantly crafts a spiritual handshake between the material and ethereal worlds.

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