Sandra Wollner’s 'Everytime' Explores Grief in the Digital Age
A haunting cinematic meditation on how modern technology reshapes our relationship with the deceased.
1A New Cinematic Perspective
Sandra Wollner’s third feature film, Everytime, offers a profound examination of how digital footprints redefine human mourning. Drawing thematic parallels to Aftersun, the film avoids traditional afterlife narratives. Instead, it focuses on the persistent, haunting presence of the deceased within our modern, cloud-based existence and the digital ether we inhabit daily.
2The Digital Afterlife Concept
The film posits that our species now encodes existence into data, creating complex neural pathways between the living and the dead. Wollner explores how consumer technology, from social media profiles to archived messages, keeps the departed present. This creates a temporal overlap where the past constantly imprints upon our current reality.
3Berlin Family Dynamics
The story follows mother Ella, played by Brigit Minichmayr, and her children in Berlin. The narrative begins with grounded, observational portraiture, emphasizing texture over incident. Director of photography Gregory Oke uses 35mm film to capture an uneasy tension, highlighting the distance between family members even when they are physically close together.
4A Sudden Tragic Shift
The film’s tone shifts dramatically when teenage daughter Jessie falls to her death after filming a seagull on her iPhone. This moment serves as a pivot point, transitioning the story from a realistic family drama into a surreal, cosmic exploration. The city remains indifferent, while the film’s visual language becomes increasingly abstract.
5Minecraft and Digital Limbo
Jessie’s digital presence is symbolized through her Minecraft world, which the film uses to represent unrendered levels of reality. After her death, the narrative plunges into these digital spaces, mirroring the characters' confusion. This visual metaphor underscores how the boundary between physical life and digital memory has become dangerously thin.
6Grief Through Digital Artifacts
Months after the tragedy, the family struggles to move forward while remaining tethered to Jessie’s digital remnants. Melli, the younger sister, sends messages to Jessie’s phone, while Ella manages work calls at the gravesite. These actions highlight the modern compulsion to seek connection through the devices that once linked them.
7Unconventional Mourning Bonds
The plot deepens as Ella and Melli form a bizarre, mutual reliance on Lux, Jessie’s former boyfriend. Their shared grief and unspoken guilt draw them together, making the absent Jessie the focal point of every interaction. This dynamic creates domestic friction, as others attempt to compartmentalize the pain of the loss.
8Haunted Physical Spaces
Wollner transforms familiar locations into haunted spaces, where shadows resemble polygonal cubes and drones beckon characters into darkness. These phenomena suggest that the digital detritus left behind by the deceased is actively influencing the physical world. The characters look for signs, blurring the line between genuine mystery and psychological projection.
9The Tenerife Trip Climax
The family eventually travels to Tenerife, a trip originally planned before Jessie’s death. In this final act, the film’s reality begins to fracture, with the laws of physics and space-time contradicting themselves. Wollner executes a complex magic trick, prioritizing the execution of the narrative over traditional plot-driven resolutions or answers.
10Masterful Performance and Tone
Brigit Minichmayr delivers a restrained performance, embodying bottled pain and disbelief with remarkable naturalness. Alongside her, Lotte Shirin Keiling captures the transition from childhood innocence to the hardened reality of adulthood. Their performances ground the film’s increasingly surreal elements, maintaining an emotional core despite the narrative’s descent into abstract, cosmic territory.
11Rejecting Future Speculation
Rather than speculating on the future of technology, Wollner focuses on the mysteries of the present. She suggests that the portals between our physical and digital worlds are already open. The film argues that these connections will lose their power only when they are fully labeled, branded, and commodified by society.
12A Decade-Defining Achievement
Everytime stands as a forward-thinking exploration of grief, marking a significant entry in contemporary cinema. By blending analog poetry with meta-modern flourishes, Wollner captures the radical effect of digital technology on human experience. It is a haunting, beguiling work that challenges how we perceive the presence of those we have lost.
Original article: IndieWire — Sandra Wollner’s 'Everytime' Explores Grief in the Digital Age