(The New/Next Film Festival ran Oct 1-4 and HtN has tons of reviews coming your way like Chris Reed’s Everytime movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s Everytime—winner of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard prize—follows the mysterious journey of the human brain through the pathways of grief. At first a lyrical exploration of late adolescence and the experimentation that comes with it, the film takes a surprising, tragic turn early on that then drives further unexpected twists. By the end, we are nowhere near where we started, which is the joy of a cinematic odyssey well told.
17-year-old Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) lives with her mother, Ella (Birgit Minichmayr, Chess Story), and younger, pre-teen sister, Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling). As the family prepares for a beach vacation, packing for the trip, Jessie steals out one night to attend a rave with her boyfriend, Lux (Tristán López). Afterwards, walking home in the woods, they start to finally feel the effects of the party drugs they took before. Watching the sun rise in the morning from the top of a neighborhood apartment building, Lux falls asleep while Jessie films the dawn hours. Suddenly, the camera lazily drifting from the roof, we witness a body dropping from the sky.
It’s shocking and not immediately clear that we’ve seen what we think we’ve seen, the camera continuing its gentle digression. Without any non-diegetic score to announce the shift in mood, everything feels almost like a dream, though the flashing lights of ambulances seem to confirm the worst. Slowly, the image resolves on Ella and Melli making their way through a cemetery to Jessie’s grave. For it was she who fell.
In the year since Jessie’s death, Ella and Melli have tried to move on, while Lux has been in Texas. Now back home, he is confronted everywhere by the same memories that plague the others. Though he has a new girlfriend, Lux is clearly wracked with guilt, though neither Ella nor Melli appear to blame him.
After a series of awkward encounters and attempts at rapprochement—including Ella trying the same drugs that doomed Jessie—the unlikely trio take off for Tenerife, the Spanish island that was the original vacation destination at the start. There, the threads of narrative reality soon fray, with time, space, memory (and even physics) folding in on themselves in layers of mystical meaning. Throw in a startling reincarnation of sorts and the line between actuality and fantasy blurs beyond recognition. This is what it feels like to confront the unthinkable.
Evocatively shot by cinematographer Gregory Oke, Everytime shares aesthetic resonances with another film of his, Aftersun, carefree, sun-filled images belying the sober truths beneath the surface. The heartfelt performances of the cast prove poignant without undue sentiment, all the more moving because of the actors’ restraint. Despite the insinuation of its title, the film is very much a wholly original meditation on mourning, beautiful in its torment and lovely in its promise of something better on the other side.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
