OVERVIEW
Everytime follows a mother, her younger daughter, and the boyfriend of her late teenage daughter as they try to continue with their lives more than a year after her sudden death. Still connected by grief, guilt, and the memory of the person they all lost, the three gradually find themselves relying on one another in unexways none of them expected. Rather than treating grief as a single dramatic event, Sandra Wollner’s film looks at what happens afterward, when life resumes but the absence never really leaves.
FESTIVAL REVIEW
Everytime is a profound and deeply touching film about the grief of losing someone unexpectedly. Yet, instead of portraying the immediate shock of a tragic loss, the film focuses on the emptiness that remains after life has supposedly returned to normal and people are forced back into their ordinary routines. As heavy as that sounds, the film never becomes oppressive or emotionally exhausting, largely because of Wollner’s empathetic direction and screenplay. There is too much tenderness in the way the characters try to keep living and try to help each other move forward for it to ever become an exercise in misery.
Wollner’s direction is simply masterful, while Gregory Oke’s ethereal cinematography captures the same bittersweet feeling he once did in Aftersun. Everytime is the better film for me, however, going deeper and taking more daring turns. The final 20 minutes are especially devastating, pushing the film into stranger and more abstract territory that invites many interpretations. It will stay with me for a long time because of how sensitively it captures not only the pain of losing someone you love, but the cruelty of having to keep living surrounded by the memory of that person. One of my favorite films of the year.
This is a capsule review part of our VIFF 2026 coverage and will be expanded closer to the film’s theatrical release.
Still courtesy of Films We Like
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
Play trailer
- Original title
- Everytime
- Director
- Sandra Wollner
- Genre
- Drama
- Cast
- Birgit Minichmayr, Tristán López, Lotte Keiling, Carla Hüttermann, Hermann Beyer, Eva Weißenborn, Knut Berger, Lilly Marie Tschörtner
- Screenwriter
- Sandra Wollner
- Composer
- David Schweighart, Peter Kutin, Timm Kröger
- Cinematography
- Gregory Oke
- Editor
- Hannes Bruun
- Country
- Language
- German
- Distributor (CA)
- Films We Like