Сандра Волллерийн “Everytime” кино нь гашуудлыг цоо шинэ өнцгөөс харуулж байна

Few human emotions are as fathomable as grief. Someone (or something) was here, had meaning and value and presence, and is now gone. There is a hole, a gap, an empty space. The pain that accompanies that void may manifest in different people in different ways, but its very existence is understandable. What makes people happy? What makes them sad? What makes them angry? Grief, well, that’s an easier question with a tougher answer.

For her third feature film, German filmmaker Sandra Wollner tackles the most tangible of dramatic genres — the grief tale — and turns it on its head in a way that our own David Ehrlich called “infinitely beguiling.” Mostly, the film shows how infinitely elastic and malleable this genre is, and the emotions that power it.

The logline for the Un Certain Regard winner is simple enough: after the death of teenager Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), her mother Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), her little sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), and her boyfriend Lux (Tristán López) form an unlikely family unit as they attempt to move on. To say much else is spoiler-y in the truest of senses: It would detract from the joy and wonder of watching this story unfold.

That Wollner’s film is doing something different with seemingly well-trod material is obvious from the start, as “Everytime” layers on cut scenes from the video game “Vintage Story” — not “Minecraft,” though Wollner understands why the audience might think it’s the more well-known game — long before the real drama kicks in.

A familiarity with “Vintage Story” is not required to understand her film, Wollner promised during a recent interview with IndieWire. “Maybe if someone hears the dialogue of Melli and Lux, then maybe they would feel they have to know more about it, because they’re talking about how you can basically cut trees to harvest stuff and to get that, but I don’t feel that you have to know anything,” she said.

Wollner herself isn’t even a “hardcore gamer,” but she admires video games for their world-building and how they can encourage exploration. Her early forays into both “Vintage Story” and “Minecraft” tickled that. “It felt like the ‘Backrooms’ phenomenon, but before the ‘Backrooms’ phenomenon,” she said. “You’re walking through infinite worlds that feel so big, but minimalistic in a way. And the sounds; a very ambient sound feels eerie and soothing at the same time. I was just very compelled and inspired by that.”

The idea that Jessie would leave behind her own video game world that Melli could then play in was one of the film’s first seeds. “I thought, it’s a way of a memorial I haven’t seen so far,” she said. “[We have this] whole world of avatars and gaming communities where people meet online and then if someone really goes out, their avatar might live forever in there and create a life on its own in a way. I just found that very intriguing, and this is why I wanted in there.”

While the film is unique in how it handles digital mementos — avatars, literally — Wollner also pays close attention to real-world details that can make grief feel even bigger.

“One of the first scenes [I thought of] was Ella lying down on the couch and hearing how her daughter would come back [into their apartment],” the filmmaker said. “It’s something I think also everybody can relate to, even with a more natural loss and not such a tragic one. For example, when I was a kid, my aunt would always run down the stairs [in the apartment complex where we lived], and I would always hear her in the morning, running down in the morning. The noise was very specific to this person. I didn’t want it to be full on, but to let us think, it couldn’t be Jessie.”

Wollner was also intrigued early on by the “constellation of people” impacted by the loss of one. “The boy, the little girl, and the mother, it’s people I’ve met in my life in several decades, I would say, variations of them, but somehow similar constellations,” she said. “They seemed very clear to me. Three people who, especially the mother and the boy, really tried to do the right thing in a way. But there is a big conflict in there. They are having a weird dependent relationship. She needs him to grieve. He needs her to forgive. Of course, I could have made this conflict much bigger, but I really was interested in ordinary people who just try to do the right thing and just try to go along with that.”

Having her own child added a new dimension to the film, even for Wollner. The filmmaker was editing the film when her daughter was born (her longtime partner is writer and cinematographer Timm Kröger, who also worked on the digital imaging in “Everytime”), an experience that deepened her understanding of her own work.

In the film’s second half, the trio travel to Tenerife, Spain on holiday, a place that baby Jessie (who we’ve seen in home videos) once visited. There, they discover another baby, who looks just like Jessie, playing happily in the same quiet space that baby Jessie once occupied.

“We watched the scene again of baby Jessie sitting there, and we looked at each other,” she said. “I always understood what [that scene] means for me, but there, we really felt it for the first time, being a parent. And I felt, oh, I really nailed it! I mean, that sounds so stupid, but when I had the baby, I think, as many people feel, you still sometimes have the feeling, oh, where does it come from? It’s suddenly here. Suddenly there’s a person there. It’s like with that moment when she walks around the corner, and baby’s sitting there.”

Wollner was also compelled by the way we memorize different places and the unpredictability of memory. The odd little space, located in the far reaches of the resort’s clubhouse, comes to haunt Ella, Melli, and Lux in different ways, forever linked to Jessie and her absence.

“When my dad died, I was with him, and I suddenly had this image of him standing somewhere in this bend on the river and fishing, and it felt so familiar,” the filmmaker said. “This memory intruded on my present. We cannot control when we get a memory. They’re just coming. Sometimes we can make them happen to come. But we never know if maybe the weird place where we saw our baby sitting or the weird moment is the one that haunts us the most. It’s this weird banal little room with this weird banal kitschy toy that is playing this music. And this is the thing that then comes back.”

Those “banal little” details pack immense emotional power. So do turns from Minichmayr and López, who never turn to over-the-top histrionics to convey their grief. Wollner’s choice to set the majority of the film a year after Jessie’s death helped, giving the characters some distance from the immediate stab of loss.

“It was a conscious choice to pick some time after the death [to mostly focus the film on],” she said. “As a writer, we need to know what happened in the time between, and so I wrote that as well, but it honestly felt not depictable. I feel I can only fail to show that. I wasn’t interested in these big emotions. That just felt too overwhelming. And sometimes we are made to believe that grief comes in these neat boxes to check: Now you’re sad, now you’re angry, now you accept. Maybe you can be angry again, then you accept. It’s just this messy thing that you can feel for a very long time.”

Keiling also offers a nuanced performance, built more on a kid’s curiosity than on saddling the young actress with big, showy scenes. There’s no screaming and crying here, no sobbing or yelling. But that doesn’t mean that Keiling wasn’t accessing some major emotions.

“I love to work with kids,” Wollner said. “And even having a kid, I think I still am a kid in a way. For this one, I met Lotte, I had not met another kid, I only met her, I did not do any other castings. I just fell in love and thought, oh, she’s exactly what I thought of Melli could be and even better, so I trusted the script to her.”

Wollner worked with fellow filmmaker Juli Neuhaus, who served as a “kids’ coach” for the younger members of the cast. Wollner and Neuhaus were eager to meet Keiling where she was. The young performer loves to draw, so she would draw the scenes before performing them, to better understand what they were about, which allowed her to access a full spectrum of feeling.

“With Melli, there was no scene where she really had to act her grief,” she said. “I always felt that the film itself, the editing and the framing, the absence, we see her doing her homework, and then we see the same room behind her, but now we know that the sister is not there anymore, I always felt that this will tell us the grief, so she doesn’t need to act it. If she holds her phone and is texting her sister, it will already make us feel the grief. She doesn’t need to feel the heavy weight of that. So, actually for her, it was, I would say, like a very light shoot. Playful. It was really playful.”

Still, for all its sense of fantasy and play, “Everytime” is about a terrible heartbreak. Yet, as ever, Wollner chose to depict Jessie’s sudden, shocking death in a unique way, tracking her fall from a tall building while out with Lux from a great distance away. We can see it. We can do nothing about it. That’s grief, too.

“This was one that really was clear to me in the writing process already, that we’re going to have this lens and that we have this weird perspective of the universe itself looking at it, being so far away and still not able to do something about it, but still witnessing so intimate,” she said.

The actors were on one high-rise building, while Wollner and her crew were on another, about half a mile away. “And we had this insane lens. I had a 3,000-millimeter consumer camera, which is an insane lens,” she said. “It’s really like you don’t want to point it on people. It feels really not OK. But I was sure that I wanted to work with exactly that length or something similar to that, that feels kind of forbidden to be so close and too far away at the same time.”

While the scene is shot as if Jessie and Lux are very close to the edge of the building, the actors were not. (Hüttermann later told Wollner that she still had the feeling she might fall, even with myriad safety measures in place. That’s just how immersive the entire thing felt.) Hüttermann’s actual fall was shot in a studio, and their visual effects supervisor Kariem Saleh combined that footage with the outdoor shots.

Because they needed a certain kind of light, Wollner estimated they had only about five takes to get it right, though she knew they would likely only get one shot with the “perfect” light. Her script also called for the camera to follow a bird after the fall, but she said with a laugh, “Unfortunately, no bird came in exactly that moment.” (They lensed other birds, though, and those also ended up in the final composite shot.)

“We worked so many hours just on the sounds, just to get the right level of there is a little sound, and there is a little tink when she falls down, a little bit,” she said. “Just to realize, given how far away we had to be, how does the sound have to be? We worked the whole time on that, and I never really felt it until I sat at Cannes in the audience. And I heard the gasps for the first time and really it went through my bones. I mean, it’s weird to say that, but I was happy, but I felt the first time that it actually worked.”

Wollner remains very emotionally connected to the film, constantly talking about the way certain scenes make her feel, either while making them or editing them or even seeing them with an audience. Of course, such a deep-feeling filmmaker crafted such a beguiling film, one that invites all sorts of responses and theories. Since Cannes, audiences have been talking about its genuinely thrilling third act and the implications of its final scenes. And while we won’t spoil them here, we had to ask: What did Wollner want her viewers to feel in those moments?

“The feeling that I wanted to have is that [this film that is] grounded or hopefully grounded in the beginning, then suddenly you walk around the corner and you feel still some ground, but it’s such an odd place now and you don’t know,” she said. “I always hoped it doesn’t feel just dreamy, but there is some groundedness to it and that the people still react in a way that made sense for them, the characters, but that you don’t know what room you entered now, some kind of back room. That was clear from the beginning.”

And, as fantastical as it might sound, she’s clear: it’s all real. “I mean, it’s such a cliché to say that, but everything we see at the end is true at the same time,” she said.

A 1-2 Special release, the film is in limited theaters now, with a wide release to come in February 2027.