An unthinkable tragedy binds together Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), her daughter Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) and Lux (Tristan Lopez). He’s the ex-boyfriend of Ella’s elder daughter, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), and the last person to see her alive before she plunged to her death from a high-rise building while high on drugs. A year later, all are still reeling from their insurmountable loss, but when Lux reenters Ella and Melli’s lives unexpectedly, he stirs up old feelings of guilt and blame that have been just about kept at bay.
Everytime is Sandra Wollner’s third feature following well-received efforts The Impossible Picture and The Trouble With Being Born, and sees Austrian actress Birgit Minichmayr deliver a tremendous turn as a grieving mother struggling to reckon with her daughter’s death as well as forgive the teenage boy she holds responsible. The young Lotte Shirin Keiling and Tristan Lopez ably rise to meet her in the ensemble, which sees Ella impulsively take off with Melli and Lux for the Tenerife holiday the family were supposed to take before Jessie’s death.
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While this brief synopsis might point readers towards Charlotte Wells’ beloved Aftersun, a similarly textured film about grief that takes place on a family holiday centring a youngster and integrates handheld camera footage (they also share a cinematographer in Gregory Oke), Everytime isn’t quite the same beast, taking a turn for the fantastical when a lone toddler turns up on the trip, appearing to be Jessie as she was at three-years-old. The past, present and future become one woven timeline as Ella, Melli and Lux navigate the arrival of this new child, while still navigating the knotty thread which binds them together.
A final voice-over from an older Melli looking back on the trip and intervening years is particularly haunting, while Oke’s cinematography evokes the heady bouquet of suncream and slush puppies as the sort-of family wander around Tenerife in a half-daze. Much of Everytime’s power comes in the things that these people want to say but can’t, and the enormous burden of regret that they share, as well as the way grief has shaped their worlds since Jessie’s death. It’s a ghost story of a sort, in which a family are finally allowed to pretend, just for a moment, that the unthinkable never happened. Of course it’s unsustainable – there’s no way back to the past – but Wollner’s affecting film grants its characters, and by extension its audience, the ability to imagine otherwise, just as long as the holiday lasts.