Everyone Else

An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade’s superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade’s two-hour squirmathon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish. Chris (Lars Eidinger), an underemployed architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a middling music-industry publicist, take a week to culture their relationship in the petri dish of his parents’ Sardinian villa. The serpent enters this vacation paradise midway through in the form of another, more successful and seemingly happier pair — Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), a former schoolmate of Chris’, and Sana (Nicole Marischka). A barbecue at Hans and Sana’s is not only discomfiting but also divisive. Chris abandons Gitti to have a drink with Hans the next afternoon. Act III culminates with a reciprocal dinner invitation, the viewer wondering exactly how the simmering hostility — not to mention the yearning — will bubble over. The tumult ends with a simple request that more or less recaps the entire movie: Chris asks Gitti only to look at him.