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Every year, a good part of my TIFF journey involves seeking the films that will eventually compete for the Best International Film Oscar. After all, here at The Film Experience, we’ve always prided ourselves on giving in-depth coverage to a race many overlook. Sometimes, the films have already been submitted by their nations by the time I arrive. Toronto. Sometimes, the news comes midway through the fest, after I’ve watched a picture and dismissed it despite the fun we had together. Who knew AMPAS’ most awarded nation would go so wacky, even tacky, for their selection? As to why I decided to pair these two? Well, they both offer portraits of families in crisis, grief as seen through the prism of mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And yet, they couldn’t be more different.
From Germany, a country already in the running thanks to Berlinale winner Yellow Letters, we have Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, which took first prize in Cannes’ underrated Un Certain Regard competition. From Italy, the rare horror film to fight for the Venice Golden Lion and a Midnight Madness delight for the Toronto crowd, Paolo Stripooli’s The Spiral…
EVERYTIME, Sandra Wollner
There’s something indescribably alluring about experiencing a film you truly can’t pin down, something slippery that always escapes your grasp the second you think you’ve got a handle on it. So it is with Wollner’s study of the shared sorrows of a small family of two and a sad boy, through digital ghosts and the kind of miracles that can only come to be in the illusion of cinema. But before it takes us on that journey, to Tenerife and beyond, Everytime situates itself in the quotidian of a German family. The daughters, one a teen and the other a few years away from that difficult age, quarrel about their shared room while their single mother manages the chaos within an apartment that’s both cozy and slightly stifling.
Even so, there’s no place like home, and we’ll soon miss the banality of a happy family life, the predictability and security provided by such shots and scenes. The camera seems conscripted to certain compositional rules, dictated by domestic architecture rather than the characters moving through it, yet never restless in its position. It’s peaceful, instead, almost content. Until the older daughter’s friend, perchance a would-be paramour, invites her for a wild night out. One that feels like a goodbye before it actually turns into one. Outside the home, lost among the youths, their hopes and dreams, the camera breaks into lyricism.
Between Hannes Bruun’s cuts and Gregory Oke’s lensing, an immersive sound design and music to match, both original and curated to suggest the passions of the young, this night rushes through the characters and through us. We feel it in our gut, the euphoria of it all. But every night must turn over to a new day, every sweet journey into the oneiric must end when you wake up. It happens in one uninterrupted shot, a masterful thing that starts far away, a landscape study that only very gradually reveals its purpose when finding the two friends on a rooftop. They’re watching a sunrise the camera’s turned away from.
Or at least she is, and as the optical focus brings us closer to her, the girl’s subjectivity seems to take possession of the camera’s gaze. It drifts, following birds up into the color-changing sky and curiously pondering the building below, the homes slumbering beneath the characters’ feet. So peaceful, until it isn’t, broken by a vertiginous falling movement. Still not cutting, it drifts again, the same shot losing itself in the gold-gilded greenery of trees kissed by morning light. Mayhap, it’s her spirit, floating away. The ensuing act in Everytime’s narrative is and isn’t what you’d expect from a frank attempt at depicting the aftermath of a tragedy for which there’s no one to blame, no one to hate, no one to punish. No solace is to be found in explanations or causations.
There’s only the absence left by someone who should be here, still growing into herself, still transforming and surprising and maybe even disappointing a mother who now has a collection of “what ifs” where a daughter used to be. Wollner and her actors, led by a beautifully nuanced Birgit Minichmayr, trace how life goes on, with the odd interruption of video game footage suggesting a vigil set on a reality beyond the material, or framings so suddenly unbalanced they might make one queasy with unease. And there are the home videos, too, memories encased in little cassette tapes that now feel like miniature plastic reliquaries.
Pay attention to those. Not just because Aftersun was a major inspiration for Wollner, but also because she’ll use the echoes of that video device to transport us from the cinematic impressions of Charlotte Wells to Dreyer’s wonder through faith, grief and love. Above all else, love from which the pain and the belief come spewing out of, like water from a spring. With that in mind, know that I’ve seldom seen a film take such a bold detour as Everytime does in its third act, when the trio of mother, sister and friend turned witness, fulfill a summer trip planned long before death came knocking on their doorstep. Under the Spanish sun, shifts in the cosmos occur in the simplest cinematic terms. That of a shot repeated imperfectly, its stock and aspect ratio transformed.
That’s enough to upend everything, and allow for a new world order where a square sunset, suspended in time, makes as much sense as anything else. It’s enrapturing, rapturous cinema of the highest order, finishing on the suggestiveness of an ellipsis that’s almost a sly wink in the viewer’s direction. It’s assuring us the film will keep its secrets to itself. At the same time, it seems to communicate a need to surrender, to plunge deep into Everytime’s metaphysical manifestations and ramifications of loss. Let yourself be consumed, pulled under its waters. And when you’ve given yourself over, utterly and unconditionally, open your mouth and breathe in. Here, you won’t drown. You’ll transcend.
Everytime has been acquired by up-and-coming distributor 1-2 Special. Its release is expected in early 2027 in the US, though an awards-qualifying run is likely to precede it. Don’t miss your chance, for there’s no other film quite like it.
THE SPIRAL, Paolo Strippoli
Catching a Midnight Madness screening at TIFF can be a perilous endeavor, especially if you’re a critic who’s been up since early morning to catch the first press screenings of the day. Exhaustion has often set in, but with it can come a trepidation that’s not all too distant from intoxication. Especially when you find yourself with a game audience, an even more enthusiastic master of ceremonies and a picture as uncompromisingly tasteless as The Spiral sets itself to be. Walking back to my hotel room, dazed and confused, I couldn’t say if I’d just seen the most fatphobic and queerphobic Venice title since The Whale, or if what had actually screened was some sort of unholy blessing from the movie gods, destined to land on John Waters’ Top Ten. Both?
Weeks later, I’m still not sure, but that’s part of the fun. And The Spiral is a whole lot of fun, whatever sins it may or may not commit along the way. Essentially, it’s a spin on the Faust mythos that distances itself from Goethe’s romanticism to reach for something a little more sordid, a little less moralistic, and a whole lot more Italian. From its very start, you can tell that director Paolo Stripolli isn’t holding back and that the entire production team has been instructed to remove the word “restraint” from their vocabulary, perhaps erase the concept from their mind entirely. There’s a storm of Biblical proportions coming, and an aged Jasmine Trinca plays Anna, making her way through Rome to her daughter’s, so she can do something that’s not entirely clear.
Is she there to commiserate about a family history full of tragedies, to mend a broken relationship, or to enact some violence to do with the mysterious suitcase she brought along? The editing is spiky and sharp, the cinematography a glossy spectacle of uncomfortable angles, the music out of some Expressionist self-parody, and the acting even more overblown than all those formal flourishes. Everything is in perfect balance, however, with Trinca settling down to tell a story that starts twenty years ago, in 1999, at an Assumption Day party that was more about showing off wealth than celebrating the Virgin Mary’s ascent to heaven. “We were what others wanted to be,” the matriarch says, and she’s not wrong.
All dressed in white, the sequence explodes with Sorrentino-esque excess, begging for something to break the glossy ostentation of a world of moneyed people who dance through life as if it were a music video, perchance a glamorous perfume commercial. So, of course, a dog goes rabid and almost bites the leg off a little girl, staining all that white blood red. It’s Anna’s little girl, who was supposed to audition for a commercial, to become the star her mother dreamed of being. At the hospital, when praying to the same Virgin Mary whose day she was just profaning in her socialite ways, the mother is met with a stranger. She’s Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in a gabardine out of some giallo, crowned by a fuckass blonde bob and adorned with a lit cigarette.
She’s the Mephistopheles to Anna’s Faust, the devil coming to the desperate in their hour of need with a deal that will work as well as any wish you make with a monkey’s paw. Anna trades her daughter’s recovery for her son’s health, cursing him to a supernatural fatness that takes over his life in the most grotesque terms possible. Is The Spiral’s mockery of the young actor’s body sincere or an indictment of its protagonist’s superficiality? After a while, is there even a distinction, when the movie makes it clear it’s out to entertain with schlock and awe? Alas, moralism has no place in The Spiral, whose repetitive structure means each trade provokes a tragedy which induces another trade, the terms of the deal never explicit enough to make it fair.
This could grow old, real fast, yet Strippoli has enough pizzazz to keep the show going in all its tragicomic glory, an opera buffa full of gore and a slight strain of lesbian panic as our devilish wishmaster keeps forcing herself upon her favorite victim. For what it’s worth, Trinca and Tedeschi are having the time of their lives with these roles. The latter has given herself fully to the heightened archetype in the text, playing up that soft, almost breathless, delivery she brings to every performance and making something obscene out of it. Trinca plunders the part of Anna for shreds of humanity, grounding her awfulness in order to better portray the monster at the center of this vicious cycle – or should I say spiral? Along with the sheer shamelessness of it all, the actress duo is the best reason to give this Midnight Madness oddity your attention.
The Spiral is still searching for a US distributor, though its odd mix of prestige and perversion will sure lure in some fearless company. The Venice competition slot and sheen of being Italy’s official Oscar submission will surely help.
Of these two flicks, I’d put my chips on Everytime to make the shortlist. Then again, the Academy has grown more comfortable at embracing Grand Guignol, as Amy Madigan’s recent victory can confirm. And with Italy being one of their favorite countries… well, stranger things than The Spiral making the cut have happened.