Review: Everytime

Wonderful. Though the script for Everytime got started a couple years beforehand, writer and director Sandra Wollner is clear about the influence of Aftersun, having its DP Gregory Oke to come aboard here. A tragic final rave, a vacation, and a child unable to decipher her parent’s inner world are all present. The picture evokes the same strong feelings of nostalgia too, but the edit invokes something much more digital, using a phone’s camera roll and a Minecraft clone’s god mode to noclip through hills and mountains into the unknown depths.

The film’s most striking sequence early on glides the camera in the same way, curiously and voyeuristically, finding heights and valleys in Berlin’s cityscape. The rest of it is a family repeatedly climbing the same altitudes, despite any fear or reservations, unable to let go of their inquisitive and desiring natures. They yearn for another chapter in the story, so they each start writing their own from atop hills and massive hotels in order to get a better view.

Though affecting, the film is an unusual mish-mash of clones—the Aftersun comparison, using the licensing-friendly Vintage Story instead of Minecraft, and a particularly odd cover (if you could call it that) of Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Boring Angel.” There’s a story device in the third act that almost plays into this feeling of familiarity, something Wollner is actively engaging in throughout the film via construction versus dissection of a memory, but one could also say there’s some risky layers of inspiration here that invokes Block Icarus getting close to the square sun. Regardless, this would be the most interesting form of an open source film.