Everytime: Sandra Wollner’s digital-age fairytale finds light in a time of grief
The Austrian director’s mesmerising third feature looks at a family in mourning, using the language of video games to explore the complicated nature of digital ‘remembrance’.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival
In a pivotal sequence in Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, the sun appears as a radiant box on the horizon. A visual reference to the survival game Vintage Story (easily mistaken for Minecraft), the celestial square doesn’t seem to emit its glow but allow it to leak in from somewhere behind the sky – a source of light that doubles as a hole in the world. The uncanny image encapsulates the feel of this cryptic, digital-age fairytale, its presence suggesting a porous, simulated reality. In Everytime, grief is both a rupture and a wellspring.
The film’s initial tragedy, a teenage girl falling to her death, is captured as if by accident while a roving camera surveys Berlin’s rooftops at sunrise. High on MDMA after sneaking out to a rave with her boyfriend, Jessie (Carla Hütermann) suddenly makes eye contact with the lens, which loses interest and tilts to study the shuttered windows below. After she plummets through the frame, we occupy the point of view of a player diving through the virtual terrain of the Vintage Story video game.
Continuing without comment or ceremony, the film observes the daily rhythms of Jessie’s mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), her younger sister Melli (Lotte Keiling), and her boyfriend Lux (Tristán Lopez) as life goes on without her in it. Any initial shock is elided. Ella is already stoic by the time we see her lay flowers on her daughter’s grave. Lux has bottled up his feelings of responsibility for the accident. Melli is managing as well as a young child could, but she still plays Jessie’s favourite videogame and sends her sister emojis and birthday texts, reaching out by way of screens.
Digital imprints of Jessie are everywhere, and so are the devices that capture them; fuzzy home movies, iPhone camera rolls, and in one dread-soaked sequence, an unexplained encounter with a surveillance drone. This ominous grace note, bringing the sinister operations of the cloud down to a human level, serves as a reminder that our repositories of remembrance can be monetised and weaponised as data points. “She’s just there all the time, like a walking memorial,” says one of Lux’s callous male friends from behind his laptop.
The trio’s divergent mournings gradually boil over during encounters with nature. Ella and Lux take drugs and trip together in a forest, walking the same route the kids did during Jessie’s last night on earth. The three of them then decamp to Tenerife, where the hills, the mountains, and the seacoast seem to provoke a wrinkle in time.
If the film’s air-tight conception sometimes functions as an emotional stopper, leaving the characters closed-off and abstracted, it is by design. The balance may not always be struck, but Everytime is concerned with a distinctly modern numbness, the irrepressible grief and guilt and grace that subtly persist through a world we no longer recognise. Wollner’s film is majestic and mysterious, spectral and sweet, perfused with the sort of ambiguity that can puncture a hermetic seal, and let the light pour in.