Continuing after loss
After her older daughter Jessie dies, Ella tries to continue living with Melli. A difficult connection also develops with Lux, a teenager to whom some responsibility is attributed. A holiday in Tenerife brings these people together without neatly resolving their conflicts.
Sandra Wollner is less interested in major confrontations than in how memory works after a devastating loss. The present, past experiences and imagined possibilities begin to overlap.
Different images of one memory
The controlled direction gradually allows disruptions to emerge. Gregory Oke’s photography makes everyday things feel concrete and unfamiliar at once. Landscapes and sunlight do more than establish atmosphere: they belong to the characters’ perception.
Family recordings, digital images and conventional cinematic images coexist naturally. I do not experience that as a formal trick, but as an appropriate expression of a state in which remembering no longer has a clear order.
Feelings without lengthy explanations
Birgit Minichmayr expresses Ella’s distress through looks, routines and small decisions. Lotte Shirin Keiling gives Melli her own way of dealing with loss. Tristan López moves between closeness, blame and uncertainty as Lux. The relationship remains more complicated than a simple allocation of responsibility.
This restraint is demanding. Sometimes the storytelling becomes so delicate that the narrative thread almost disappears. Viewers seeking clear turning points and quick emotional resolutions may experience the film as distant.
Verdict
Everytime is formally distinctive, emotionally serious and, for me, remarkably free of sentimentality. Wollner tries to make a state of being visible rather than closing it with easy answers. The challenge of its slow storytelling belongs to that consistency. For the precise direction and excellent ensemble, I give it 9 out of 10.