‘All The Time’ review: Three women are linked by shared trauma in intriguing if flawed Belgian debut

Dir: Amelie Derlon Cordina. Belgium. 2025. 77mins

A suicide triggers reminiscences of male violence for 3 ladies on an evening out in Brussels in Amelie Derlon Cordina’s intimate, intense debut All of the Time, which bows in Seville. Coming after a collection of mid-length movies, Derlon Cordina’s characteristic debut, with its restricted dramatic canvas and its informally conversational air, feels appropriately compact, gracefully pulling collectively its three narratives because it permits us to listen in on its protagonists’ lives. 

A mixture of lightness of contact and heavy-handedness

A flawed mixture of lightness of contact and heavy-handedness, All The Time boasts robust performances. Although maybe too sweeping in its denunciation of male aggression, Derlon Cordina’s empathetic understanding of the way it can ripple out into different folks’s lives means that additional berths at auteur-friendly festivals await.

Enjoyably, the movie drops us instantly into the lives of its three protagonists and can swap between them – although, much less enjoyably, we’re abruptly and unnecessarily yanked out of them 22 minutes in, when the actor credit abruptly pop up on the display screen. The primary is Kaat (Kaat Arnaert, delivering an highly effective, authentically pushed efficiency), a singer and power of nature who is about to play a live performance at a membership positioned in Brussels’ Bourse. 

Already grumpy because the movie begins, Kaat’s temper worsens when she learns {that a} man has taken his personal life by leaping off the constructing reverse. Initially refusing to carry out, she ultimately goes by with it and, after fantastically singing a morose and considerably generic indie ballad, feels compelled to inform the gobsmacked viewers the completely harrowing story of how she misplaced her personal husband, a former band member.

Raph (Raphaelle Corbisier) is attending the live performance along with her companion Yasmine (Yasmine Yahiatene) and her 10 year-old daughter Sistine (Juliette Goossens). All goes effectively till Raph bumps into an outdated buddy whose inconsiderate feedback, mixed with the occasions of the night, drive Raph into changing into verbally abusive. She recounts to Yasmine her personal story of male abandonment on the time of Sistine’s start, a trauma which appears to have since led Raph to desert different males. It’s a dreadful reminiscence, but it surely feels dramatically implausible that solely now would Raph be telling her lover about it for the primary time.

Additionally there for the live performance is nurse Ingrid (Ingrid Heiderscheidt), alongside along with her blind date, the amiable, insecure Nicolas (Nicolas Lucon). Nicolas is the closest this bleak movie involves a comic book character – inside a minute of assembly Ingrid, for instance, he’s brightly telling her a few buddy’s excrement fetish. Their night collectively is basically spent wandering across the constructing and awkwardly making an attempt to barter each other as Kaat’s band performs on within the background.

The indirect title is reminscent of Donald Ray Pollock’s 2011 novel The Satan All of the Time (and Antonio Campos’ 2020 adaptation of it) and it’s clear that, right here, males are certainly the satan. In all three tales, it’s a man who, by both thoughtlessness or intention, has wreaked havoc within the lives of the folks he’s supposed to like, and we’re witnessing the delayed aftermath of these occasions. Within the current, Kaat’s brother Rint (Rint Mennes) additionally shows nearly superhuman ranges of insensitivity in specializing in the band’s future reasonably than partaking with Kaat’s trauma. However curiously, no one within the movie, both male or feminine, voices any sympathy for the nameless man who has jumped from the constructing.

Although we’re in a position to put among the items collectively when it comes to understanding these ladies’s previous lives, we study little or no about their histories besides once they immediately recall the reminiscences triggered by the suicide. As characters, all of them really feel slightly overdetermined by that one trauma. 

Another sections of the movie fall sufferer to unsure pacing: we get to listen to Kaat’s reasonably unexceptional first track in its entirety, for instance, whereas a few prolonged dancefloor scenes come over as cliched. That stated, the direct recollections by Kaat, Raph and Ingrid are undeniably potent. These polished and gripping mini-narratives, beautifully delivered by their respective actresses, are actual edge-of-your-seat stuff, disturbing and heartbreaking without delay.