By Jason Osiason

Grief is the most powerful thing a person can feel, and almost no movie knows what to do with it. They explain it. They give it a monologue and a montage and a scene at a window and send you home. Everytime doesn’t explain anything. It hands you the thing itself, the way it actually works, which is that you can feel completely lost and completely normal in the same afternoon, you can move on and never heal and both of those are true at once, and you can know exactly who you blame and still have to be the person who’s accountable for whatever happens next. I came out feeling like someone had told me something I already knew and had been refusing to hear.

The setup is almost nothing. A mother in Berlin, two daughters, a beach holiday packed and ready to go, and the older girl sneaks out the night before to be with her boyfriend and doesn’t come back. A year later, Birgit Minichmayr’s Ella and Lotte Shirin Keiling’s Melli take the trip anyway. Same trip, same island, and Tristán López’s Lux, the boyfriend, comes with them. Sandra Wollner watches them eat and swim and not say the thing, and the not-saying gets so loud you start saying it for them in your head.

Minichmayr is extraordinary, and she does it without a speech telling us what she’s feeling. The blame is in her shoulders. She doesn’t need to accuse the kid out loud; you can watch her deciding what to do with him every time he walks into frame. López has the harder job, a boy who needs forgiveness from someone who may not be able to give it, and he plays it like he’d take the hit if she’d just throw the punch. Keiling’s Melli still has to be a kid around these two, which is somehow the saddest part.

Gregory Oke makes Tenerife look almost offensively beautiful. These people are miserable and the island keeps looking like somewhere you should book. The sisters’ video game, Vintage Story, gets at something just as uncomfortable: a world someone built can still be sitting there, waiting for them to come back. A person is gone and their stuff keeps working. Wollner understands how strange that is without making anyone explain it.

Then the movie does the thing. I’m not going to describe it. People are going to call it magical realism, and that’s probably the closest description we have, but it doesn’t quite account for how naturally the film gets there. It’s so gentle, so completely inside the logic of these three people, that by the time you understand what you’re looking at, you’ve already accepted it the way they have. I can’t remember the last time a film asked me to follow it somewhere this strange and made it feel this easy.

I miss my late friend. I’m not going to write about them here. I’ll just say there’s the version of grief movies keep selling us, the one with an arc, and then there’s the real one, where you get a little bit of someone back in a dream or a song or something dumb on a screen and you take it and you don’t ask questions. This is the second kind. Wrecked me. I needed it. [A]