Everyone Else

City Paper Grade: A-

by Sam Adams

OR ELSE: Maren Ade's film is so subtle, you might not think anything is happening. But it is.

[CITY PAPER GRADE: A- ]

It's easy to feel like nothing's happening in German director Maren Ade's second feature. Chris (Lars Eidinger), an aspiring architect, and his girlfriend, Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), laze in the sun at his parents' Mediterranean villa, dreaming up private jokes and making frequent love. The movie airdrops us into the middle of their relationship, with only the occasional phone call or chance encounter to provide a hint of the lives they've temporarily left behind.

At first, Ade's camera merely seems to be shadowing them; the shots feel offhand, if not haphazard. But a sense of their rapport develops gradually: his ambition and insecurity, her reflexive honesty and passionate neediness.

Over the course of several days, Everyone Else plays out their conflicts. Chris' weasely tendencies are brought to the fore by a run-in with an older, more successful colleague (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and his pregnant wife (Nicole Marischka). Over dinner, his conversation turns disingenuous in ways we might miss if not for Gitti's subtly pained reactions. Ade almost never uses close-ups, but the actors' performances are so finely tuned she doesn't need them.

Although Chris and Gitti rarely come to the point of confrontation, their vulnerabilities become so apparent that late scenes take on the qualify of a horror movie. You have the sense that either could be deeply wounded at any point. Gitti is the more volatile, Chris the more abrasive, but each feels unfinished, precarious — as in some ways does Ade's film.There's an open-endedness to the movie that comes close to being vague or shapeless. She's so inside her characters that perspective is hard to come by. That said, we're inside them, too.

Everyone Else feels less like voyeurism than symbiosis, merging spectator and spectacle until the boundary between them starts to dissolve. When it does inject a few conventionally dramatic notes toward the end, the departure rings false, but for the rest of the time, the nothing that's happening feels much like what happens to us every day.