At the heart of Sandra Wollner’s melancholy, fantastical German drama Everytime, which won the top prize in this year’s Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, is Minecraft. Yes, Germany’s official Oscar entry, and one of the year’s most poignant films, finds its beating, cubic heart among the game’s blocks. It’s not a ridiculous adaptation with Jack Black and chicken jockeys, nor is it a film that takes place entirely inside the game itself, like World Of Warcraft in the heartbreaking documentary The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin. Instead, the film uses the small, lasting changes that a single player can make to the game’s sandbox world as a subtle yet expansive metaphor for the impact one person’s life has on those around them, even after that life ends.
It’s fitting that the death of a teenager—a young person now frozen forever in an era of misunderstandings and miscommunications—should be translated through a language and form specific to them. After the shocking accident that opens the otherwise alluringly languid Everytime, Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) leaves her family and her ex-boyfriend with little but memories and digital artifacts, which begin to blur together as they mourn her. Wollner strands Jessie’s little sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), ex Lux (Tristán López), and mom Ella (Birgit Minichmayr) in their loss, with only each other and some intangible technological reminders to fill the void.
The latter takes shape in ways familiar to cinematic expressions of grief—like voice notes and text message histories, which provide a modern update to the home videos Jessie’s family watches on repeat—and is alluded to using the video game that Melli and Lux once shared with her. A year after Jessie’s death, when the lanky Lux slinks back into the family’s life, he and Melli hole up in Jessie’s old room, playing around in her Minecraft world, which is almost as intimate as hearing her voice or seeing her photo. They’re getting to wander through her thoughts, her creations, locked in time. Her absence adds poetry to each personal Minecraft world being called an “instance.”
At one point, during this play, the Minecraft character which had been scaling a hillside falls, clipping through the environment and entering into a glitchy empty space beneath what should be accessible. It’s a momentary reflection of the unknown afterlife, using the same kinds of game-born imagery as Backrooms.
Slowly, as the otherwise grounded drama loses its tether to reality and linear time, the audiovisual remnants of Jessie start becoming more tangible. Eventually, even those Minecraft pixels break free from their bonds and find their way into the real world. During an uncanny, disconcerting, spur-of-the-moment vacation undertaken by the trio, where they spend the film’s third act fleeing Berlin in favor of a beachy resort on the Spanish island of Tenerife, Everytime channels both the unreality of Last Year At Marienbad and the mimicked reality of a video game. Giving a new meaning to “island time,” Aftersun cinematographer Gregory Oke shoots the mourners in the warm glow of an eternal sunset. But it’s not just the flow of time that’s off. The holidayers around them confirm what the family can’t believe: The sun that refuses to fully dip below the horizon is a cube, a Minecraft block freed from its server and lighting up another world that refuses to change or move on.
Trapped in this perpetual golden hour, accompanied by David Schweighart’s electronic and harp-like score, a rift opens up between the film’s leads and those around them. There’s panic and chaos in the background—sirens and fear—while the main characters seem to operate in a different world. They’re distant and serene, the dissonance giving the ending an ominous undercurrent.
As her characters try to move on from the past by attempting to relive it, Wollner quietly unfurls a threatening idea about what grief looks like in our tech-savvy present and in the near future. In a world where AI companies offer to resurrect your dead grandmother using her voicemails, profile pictures, and Facebook posts, there is a burgeoning industry forming around never learning to move on from loss in a healthy way. An emerging business model is predicated upon refusing to accept mortality. Teetering her film on the edge of this, using the shared world of Minecraft as one of its most potent images, Wollner makes one of the year’s smartest and most cutting-edge films about death.
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