EVERYTIME: PRESS

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"Here it is: the masterpiece of this year’s Cannes Film Festival! [...] The way Wollner gives space to the grief of each of the main characters, does entirely without assigning blame, and grants every character endless grace: there is currently nothing else like it in world cinema. The cinematography, editing, and music come together into a total work of art that never feels self-indulgent and at every moment serves the film’s themes."
_{Critic (DE), 05/2026}

"It would be easy to reach for the term ‘magical realism’ in describing the film’s climax, but the precise internal logic of Wollner’s film elevates it above so much of what is meant by that term. Here, the impossible appears to occur, but with a grounded psychological precision that more than earns the break with reality and means that the film’s carefully established realism is deepened – reaching almost unbearable levels of emotional resonance, rather than undermined."
_{Screen Daily (US), 05/2026}

"What emerges among these three is something rare in cinema: a portrait of mourning so precise it becomes physical. The images slow and hold. The sun forgets its own rules. Time becomes something you feel in the body rather than measure on a clock. [...] The performances are beyond praise. Birgit Minichmayr as the mother is a force of nature held under extraordinary compression — every glance, every silence, a world. The three actors together achieve something that cannot be directed, only coaxed into being: a living, breathing intimacy that makes the grief on screen feel genuinely shared. [...]
This is cinema at its most necessary: unresolved, uncompromising, and fully alive. Everytime does not offer answers. It offers something rarer — the feeling of having been, for two hours, completely inside another life, another loss, another way of moving through time. See it, and surrender to it entirely. "
_{International Cinephile Society, 05/2026}

"Sandra Wollner delivers a brilliantly directed, highly enigmatic and dizzying helter-skelter of a movie. [...] It’s a journey through space-time, through memories, disappearances and reappearances, through signs and unspeakable echoes, woven into a narratively stunning and visually sublime cinematographic cloth which is, ironically, anchored in the unadulterated realism of everyday modern life."
_{Cineeuropa, 05/2026}

"Elevating low-key domestic portraiture with extraordinary technical finesse, toward a big-swing finale of radical conceptual daring, the Austrian filmmaker’s third feature felt like the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year’s Un Certain Regard program. [...] What sticks in “Everytime” are the starkest, least explicable intrusions of dreamlike incident into the world we think we know, which Wollner and her collaborators have thus far outlined with such rigor and precision. It’s the film’s most audacious logical and stylistic swerves that will continue to turn heads on the festival circuit, clearly confirming its helmer as a major in the making, but not in a way that feels like empty auteur showoff-ery: Even through its more inscrutable story turns, “Everytime” remains deeply, legibly and sometimes overwhelmingly felt."
_{Variety (US), 05/2026}

"Everytime" is a remarkably moving film about grief, guilt and the power of memories.
_{ZIB (AT), 05/2026}

"In Everytime, a sun-dappled film about death and love that might be the best in Cannes this year, the terrible loss of a teenage girl’s life leaves her mother, younger sister, and boyfriend bound in mutual devastation. [...] This is a film that lingers in the bloodstream, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since."
_{The Film Stage (US), 05/2026}

"A film that manages to explore the mystery of pain in an original way and exposes the ghosts that haunt our lives. [...] The trip to Tenerife, postponed by a year, becomes the boundary that must be crossed to reach the world of ghosts; arriving on the island marks the next step into the illusory realm of hallucination. The pastoral composition drives the movements of contemplation toward an extreme lyricism, a sublime metaphysical language, an ornamentation and exaltation of a complex and abstract vision. The entry into the fluid universe of dreams, within an order wounded by loss, lays its foundations upon ruins: the magical action of a divine breath whispering against horror and making the melody of healing resonate. "
_{SentieriSelvaggi (IT), 05/2026}

"Sandra Wollner’s film, screening in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section, is a film of the purest presentness, one that slips out of time, reaching back into the characters’ past and gazing into the realm of the irrealis. It is at least the future perfect, in the impossible form. In the present moment of watching, Everytime hits you in the face with a fist. A punch in the face. Brutal, painful, unavoidable. [...] Together, they set out into the past. They travel to Tenerife, to the exact place where Jessi appears in the vacation videos. The wild ocean is held back from the bathers by a barrier wall; they are cradled in a fragile sense of safety in the face of the death the waves represent. This demarcation, this threshold between life and death, is what Wollner traverses in the furious final section. Here, certainty about what has been told finally dissolves into the irrealis, into the mode of impossibility, and at the same time into the idea that ultimately everything can exist simultaneously — time exists only as every-time, as everytime. Death and life, past and future, everything is there at once when we no longer know where we actually are. In the state of greatest distress, children fire a flare into the sky: Save our souls. The shot halts the sun’s course across the heavens, and it comes to a standstill as a radiant square."
_{Arteshock (DE),05/2026}

"What the characters do matters more than what they say. Wollner delves into the maelstrom of their subconscious; her breath eventually sweeps away reality. The filmmaker invites us into these interstices of solitude, where the brutality of life is bathed in peaceful electronica. One must know how to listen, and know how to look: the absent ones are watching us, and we can see them."
_{Le Polyester (DE), 05/2026}

"Presented in the Un Certain Regard section, this intriguing film, with its hypnotic pace and striking visual beauty, explores the themes of grief and loss. [...] There are some magnificent and deeply moving scenes in *Everytime*. The film’s music and lighting lend it a mesmerising quality, a sense of magic. Like a sunset. You find yourself with tears streaming down your face without even realising it."
_{France info (FR), 05/2026}

"A fresh new vision of cinema unfolds in front of our eyes. Emerging from the cinema, you will never see the world the same way again. Wow. This here is real, profound, bold cinema. [...] Keep an eye out for Everytime and enjoy getting lost inside of this unique film."
_{Firstshowing.net (US), 05/2026}

"A beautiful complex portrait on grief. Sandra Wollner delivered the best film of Cannes 2026."
_{Ioncinema (US), 05/2026}

"This is a kind of cinema that manages to maintain an eerie underlying tension and to surprise the viewer with every image, every sound and every new setting. And it is a cinema that is deeply humanistic, for the detachment mentioned earlier eventually turns out to be a fragile shell."
_{Der Standard (AU), 05/2026}

"The Austrian director, who lives in Berlin, has created with her equally sensitive and surreal drama about the process of grieving a classic for the future — and, with the top prize in Cannes’ second competition, ‘Un Certain Regard,’ achieved one of the greatest Cannes successes in German film history. [...] This highly musical film achieves a polyphonic quality that is far more common in music than in cinema, and which proves itself a worthy successor to the legacy of Hitchcock, Buñuel and Lynch."
_{Frankfurter Rundschau (DE), 05/2026}

"Sandra Wollner’s third feature film, selected for Un Certain Regard, is a striking reminder that the memories of our loved ones will live on in our world forever; poetic, unforgettable and boldly directed, Everytime is simply the best the Cannes Film Festival had to offer. [...] Rarely in the history of cinema has such a drastic shift in tone — so violent as to cause a cinematic whiplash — been executed with such grace, at the climax of a single-take tracking shot, warmed by the gentle rays of the morning sun. Heart-wrenching, nostalgic, surprising. [...] As we delve into this story, a glimpse is offered into the nature of human suffering and the very meaning of existence. A fleeting glimpse of which we shall retain not the memory, but only the sensation."
_{Cinema-Austriaco (AU), 05/2026}

"With a camera guided by inner feelings and editing punctuated by the rhythm of the outside world, Sandra Wollner blurs the boundaries between past and present, between life and death."
_{RFI (FR), 05/2026}

"Everytime is therefore a complex film. Complex because it rejects the linearity of the world, the pre-determined coherence of events. The feature film explores the monstrous tsunami generated by such a loss, with an explosion of every reference point, norm, boundary and perspective."
_{Avoir-Alire (FR), 05/2026}

"Everytime” is observed and performed with extreme precision, while remaining guaranteed 100 percent free of kitsch. At the same time, however, it presents itself as a strange puzzle — and a sloshing water bottle on the chest of a sleeping girl in a yellow T-shirt is just one of many possible clues. You sense from the very beginning that something is “off,” even if you certainly cannot foresee the full extent of it. Because at the latest, when the square block-shaped sun rises over Tenerife, it becomes absolutely clear: we have never seen anything like "Everytime" on the big screen before. It really was high time! A mysterious and tender cinematic marvel that simply never stops surprising its audience again and again, right up to its final shot. "
_{Filmstarts (DE), 05/2026}

"In beautiful, dreamlike, melancholic images and moods — yet also very close to reality and everyday life — Wollner tells the story of a mother and her two daughters. [...] Wollner plays with reality, artfully merging memory and lived experience, blurring time itself, and telling of the attempt to hold on to a lost person, to preserve the memory of them, to see them again — subtly and poetically. [...] Editor Hannes Bruun and composer David Schweighart, both of whom were awarded for their work on The Trouble with Being Born, each contribute their part to an exceptionally cohesive and atmospheric film."
_{The Spot Media (DE), 05/2026}

"There are very few films that can portray so strikingly the experience of trying to make sense not only of the loss itself, but also of the parts of oneself that seem to disappear along with it."
_{BantMag (TR), 05/2026}

"The best film I saw at Cannes might be the best new film I’ve seen all year. Everytime is a drama following a mother and daughter in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy. But it’s much more than this. [...] this is an experience all its own – a metaphysical head-scratcher that blurs reality with fiction, prompting each viewer to draw their own conclusion from one scene to the next. The bewitching film will prove fodder for viewers who welcome ambiguity, but will be written off by some who prefer things tied up in neat little bows. Instead, Everytime dares you to re-tie the bow in different ways to see what you end up with. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book in film form."
_{Independent (UK), 05/2026}

"Sandra Wollner’s Everytime is a film about what does not fade away. The grief, the inner devastation after the death of a beloved child. The emptiness that remains when someone is no longer there. [...] A film that does not explain what grief is, but shows how it changes over time. That is the key to this extraordinary drama, which was celebrated here with frenetic enthusiasm: in the end, there is no consolation, but a rare form of clarity — some events are never truly behind us. They merely change their shape."
_{Celluloid Filmmagazin (AT), 05/2026}

"In Everytime, Sandra Wollner’s third feature film, grief exceeds the status of a mere theme to become a substance that permeates bodies, alters images, and settles even within the gaps of the editing."
_{Culture aux trousses (FR), 05/2026}

"Simultaneously slow-moving and absorbing, “Everytime” is a luminous, life-affirming cinematic voyage perfected by its accomplished camera choreography and patient storytelling."
_{Nextbestpicture (US), 05/2026}

"Everytime is haunting in its ability to remain with the viewer, mostly due to some images which are like those photos you view once and never forget. A building at sunrise, a doorway near the beach with a child playing, a green forest down view from the train tracks, all those moments have stayed with me long after I watched the film, and for that, Everytime is pure genius."
_{Flaunt.com (US), 05/2026}

"The fatal fall arrives as a collapse of filmic grammar, staged with clinical precision and a quiet terror that seems to drain oxygen from the frame. Wollner and editor Hannes Bruun withhold any stable vantage point that might let the spectator arrange the disaster into meaning. Fragmented cuts, inverted fields, and abrupt shifts in perspective fracture visual certainty. The scene captures cognition in crisis, the mind failing to assemble space, cause, and consequence. [...] Everytime stands as a clinical, hauntingly poetic examination of existence altered by tragedy. Sandra Wollner bypasses structural melodrama to probe the strange reality of trauma. By discarding narrative logic in favor of a sovereign, digital simulation, the film captures the absolute length to which the human mind travels to escape a shattering loss. It is a demanding work of art, presenting an uncompromising aesthetic that rewards those willing to sit within its heavy stillness."
_{Gazettely, 05/2026}

"Sandra Wollner has crafted something extraordinary with Everytime, a film that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll. [...] The film delivers a delicate yet devastating meditation on loss that demands attention from serious cinema lovers. [...] Her directorial approach here demonstrates remarkable maturity. Every frame serves a purpose. Every moment of silence carries weight. This represents a filmmaker operating at the peak of her artistic powers. What sets Everytime apart from other films tackling similar themes is its refusal to provide easy answers or catharsis. Wollner understands that grief doesn’t follow a neat trajectory. It circles back. It surprises. It transforms ordinary moments into landmines of emotion. [...] The film’s unconventional structure might challenge viewers expecting traditional storytelling. Everytime operates on emotional logic rather than narrative logic. Scenes connect through feeling rather than plot mechanics. Time becomes fluid within the film’s framework. Past and present bleed into each other without clear demarcation. This technique proves remarkably effective at conveying how grief distorts temporal experience. The bereaved don’t live in linear time. [...] Wollner has created something that will spark conversations about how we process loss collectively and individually. The film raises questions it wisely refuses to answer. It opens spaces for reflection that extend far beyond the theater."
_{El Mundo Canada (CA), 05/2026}

"It sounds crazy, and yet it is above all the magical power of cinema that has the ability to alter reality. A bold, brilliant, truly great film, full of poetic mystery, in which everything is told in a mature and calm manner through images. Because what cannot be seen must be shown."
_{Schwäbische (DE), 05/2026}

"Starting from the fall into the void of a 16-year-old girl, Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner offers, more than a film about grief, a work with haunting images and hypnotic singularity, which stretches time in search of an alternative reality."
_{Sofilm (FR), 05/2026}

"Everytime is the kind of film that stuns you with the ingenuity of its craft – and resonates with pure emotion. Jessie, her mum Ella (Birgit Minichmayr, The Blood Countess, SFF 2026) and young sister Melli are about to leave Berlin and head on holiday to Tenerife when tragedy strikes. A year on, the pain remains acute as Ella, Melli and Jessie's boyfriend Lux try to go about their lives. On an impulse, Ella decides to rebook their ill-fated trip, and the trio head to Tenerife. Once there, past and present begin to overlap in mysterious, powerful ways under the shimmering sun and sea. Writer-director Wollner crafts a phenomenal psychological drama, both dreamlike and viscerally real."
_{Sydney Film Festival (AU), 05/2026}

"Everytime is rooted in the drama of this family (a story of death, pain and salvation), yet allows it to be reframed within the abstract play of emotion, within the need to give a new chance to the truth of life. It ventures into freedom, into the backlight and into the unheard-of and otherwise inaudible depths of reality: the film, like all of Wollner’s cinema, is as much about sound as it is about visuals; the resonances correspond to the reverberations, working magnificently in suspension. One leaves Everytime unsettled, open, imperceptibly shaken. This is cinema that inhabits our gaze and occupies our perception of feelings."
_{Duels (IT), 05/2026}

"The film then unspools like a fairytale gone wrong, all mood and omens, conjured by Gregory Oke’s mesmerising cinematography. The contours of young love, longing and maternal grief merge into the shape of a reality too painful to face head-on. And once the trio of mother, little sister and guilty boyfriend embark on a Tenerife holiday (yes, shades of Afterlife) nothing goes to plan: ocean tides and a magical child take over the story in remarkable and unforeseen ways."
_{BFI (UK), 05/2026}

"The film brilliantly explores what to do when there’s nothing to be done, when we all know that words won’t be enough to repair what has happened: a little social game that forces us to keep talking, to pretend, not to look away, nor to succumb to the darkness..."
_{Chaos (FR), 05/2026}

"The abstract depiction of the sun in the form of a rectangle is arguably the most striking image to be seen at Cannes this year. It is imbued with deep sorrow and becomes the embodiment of an irredeemable pain."
_{Arteshock (DE), 05/2026}

"The intensity of this extraordinary exploration of grief, fear, solidarity and (narrative) possibilities reaches new heights in the mysterious finale, set in an apartment complex in Tenerife.
Time periods merge into one another, images from the past burn themselves into the present as if in a drug-induced haze, and the news rushing in from the future cannot definitively clarify the events. Reality and imagination maintain their balance; the factual shatters in the surf, on the cliffs of poetry."
_{Profil (AT), 05/2026}

"It is rare to come across a film capable of settling into the viewer’s memory and continuing to generate questions long after the screening has ended. Such is the case with Everytime, the new feature film by Sandra Wollner, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Film in the Un Certain Regard section and emerged as one of the festival’s most surprising and radical works. [...] More than a story about mourning, Everytime is a reflection on how loss alters our perception of reality. In Wollner’s film, grief does not belong solely to the characters; it seems to infect the entire space around them. Presences linger like ghosts, memories overlap with everyday experience, and the boundary between external reality and imagination becomes increasingly blurred. Through images of extraordinary visual power and a constant tension between intimacy and distance, the director creates a work that questions the relationship between what we see, what we remember, and what we still wish to hold on to."
_{ODG Magazine (IT), 06/2026}

"Underneath its facade of everyday interactions, the drama of a family paralysed by a terrible loss hides a spectral vision of the near insurmountable power of grief. Even the laws of physics seem suspended when the pain of regret, guilt, and desperate longing distorts time and space. The intimate becomes cosmic as every sense of certainty disappears with the loved one suddenly taken away. Memories transform the present and obliterate the future that now lacks the person to whom it should belong. [...] Slow-paced, inscrutable, and occasionally contradictory, Wollner’s elegiac character portrait studies the empty space carved out by death and the fairy tales and lies people tell themselves to go on. Intense performances, especially from Minichmayr, and Gregory Oke’s languorous cinematography add to the haunting atmosphere of the disorienting story. Past and present overlap in the blazing sunlight—evoked repeatedly and manifest in the Latin meaning of Lux’s name—transfixing the protagonists until they lose their moral compass as well. Topography echoes mental states as empty hotels become monuments of absence. Despite its demanding themes and dramatic opaqueness, Everytime traps the audience within its hypnotic flare, like staring into the blinding sun that hides more the brighter it shines."
_{Cineccentric, 06/2026}
"Vivid, haunting, and poignant, Sandra Wollner’s experimental, psychologically adept film “Everytime” is a commitment to images of the indescribable hollowness that loss can instill in the living. [...] The lyrical mode Wollner activates is as haunting as any regret and as tangible as the dream that puts your unconscious fears in their logical place. And like a dream, “Everytime” is as unspeakable a movie as they come."
_{Rogertebert.com (US), 06/2026}

"Sandra Wollner’s ‘Everytime’ is an aesthetically monumental film experience. [...] It will take a long time before a film in the German-speaking world can match Wollner’s film in its aesthetic virtuosity and its visual power."
_{Moviebreak (DE), 06/2026}

"When this unlikely trio sets off for Tenerife on a family vacation that never got to happen, the past and present begin to quietly intertwine. The way the film transforms the journey from denial to acceptance of loss into its very narrative structure is brilliant."
_{Cinepop (PT), 06/2026}

"The feature finds its singular tone by choosing never to treat grief through the lens of melodrama. An accident becomes the continuation of a swirling long take; delicate ellipses suggest time’s work in healing wounds, and grief blends into the banality of everyday life with disarming grace."
_{Troiscouleurs (FR), 06/2026}

"Cinema has always been a matter of ghosts. Every image is the return of something that is no longer. This is the case with Everytime, where grief is less a story than a persistence of what has disappeared. [...] Trauma becomes a field of forces that alters space, distances between bodies, dead time, residual images. [...] Survivals, not losses. A film capable of moving through the minefield of the ineffable and the suspended without ever getting lost. Fissures, blinding flashes, vertigo, signs. One important one it has already left within us." _{Cinematografo (IT), 06/2026}

"Precise, surreal, overwhelming: the winning film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
It’s been a year since Jessie fell off the roof. Her mother and younger sister routinely visit her grave. Her boyfriend, who was with her on the roof that fateful night, is also trying to find his way back to normalcy. A vacation in Tenerife promises to help the three of them recapture a time that never existed but that never ends." _{Munich Film Festival (DE), 06/2026}

"These are the kinds of experiences one hopes to find in Cannes, but which this year’s main competition has largely failed to provide.
I have no hesitation in calling Everytime the strongest film of the festival. And this evening, it was rewarded in the Un Certain Regard section, which focuses particularly on emerging and younger directors. Had the film been selected for the main competition, Sandra Wollner might very well have walked away with the Palme d’Or." _{Ekko Filmmagasinet (DK), 06/2026}

"Sandra Wollner’s Delicate, Devastating Portrait of Grief Is One You Won’t Forget." _{The Wrap (US), 05/2026}

"A shattering portrait of grief that refuses to play by the rules. This year’s winner of the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Everytime is Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner's most precise and emotionally devastating work yet." _{New Zealand International Film Festival 2026 (NZ), 07/2026}

"Everytime is a film of devastating formal precision, and the best film shown at Cannes 2026. [...] Oke’s soft, occasionally fuzzy cinematography is doing the same work as the editing: dissolving the membrane between what was, what is remembered, and what the eye now sees."
_{The Disapproving Swede (SE), 05/2026}

"Everytime unfolds like a quiet revelation – never rushing, never explaining. It hands you pieces, one by one, until a portrait of grief emerges. It offers a world where burdens are not erased but transformed and dissolved in beauty, while dimensions bend and grief finds its shapely antidote seamlessly.
_{Film Fest Report (EU), 07/2026}

"We observe as the chosen family continues with their lives – maybe because they have no choice, maybe because it’s the only way to survive. Hinting at the nature of human connections and the fragility of the fibres that hold our existence, Everytime is a film for the ages."
_{New Horizons Film Festival (PL), 07/2026}

"Everytime" is a radically sensual cinematic experience about the impossibility of coming to terms with loss, and about the strange coexistence of the past, the present and a possible future. Sandra Wollner takes her style to a new, breathtaking level: infinitely surprising in every shot, teetering at every moment on the cusp between this world and that which lies beyond language."
_{Kinokult (DE), 07/2026}

"Wollner’s quietly powerful film is permeated by reflections and ambiguities: it is both a formal and thematic exploration of memories and a play on the question: what if everything is always? In Tenerife, where the trio ends up, the barriers between the past and the present, between (video) memories and even between reality and video games, eventually break down – as surprisingly as they inevitably do. And when, at the end, an angular sun refuses to set and everything suddenly seems to be happening at once, there is something healing about this film, which allows us to see anew."
_{epd Film (DE), 07/2026}

"This quiet disaster film builds up enormous emotional impact through suspense, understatement and a stunningly assured performance by Birgit Minichmayr. EVERYTIME delves into the intersection between horror vacui and a digital deluge of images. It speaks in terms of filters, ISO values, pixels and voxels. It has something to say: about the impossibility of letting go and holding on at the same time."
_{Playerweb (DE), 07/2026}

Hannes Bruun

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EVERYTIME: PRESS