‘Everything That’s Wrong With You’ Helmer on Loneliness, Farcical Web

Right before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, Slovenian director Urša Menart came across a curious phenomenon on the internet: young people, mostly women, making up tragic life stories to gather the increasingly sparse attention span of their followers. Even more curiously, the director realized people would often drop everything to visit these micro-influencers. The muddled parasocial relationship between poster and follower would come to inspire “Everything That’s Wrong With You,” having its world premiere as part of the narrative feature competition section at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival. 

The dramedy first finds young Maruša (Anuša Kodelja) back in her home country of Slovenia after a season living in Berlin. She just lost her mother to cancer, and the grief only amplifies her sense of displacement. While aimlessly scrolling one day, Maruša comes across Alja (Klara Kuk), a nurse living in a small coastal town in Germany. She sends a first message, which quickly spirals into a fast-developing friendship that is put to the test once they finally meet in person. 

“What fascinated me wasn’t really the aspect of people inventing these stories, but the other side, those who befriended those folks, who followed them, who traveled across continents to visit them,” Menart tells Variety. “This was the first germ of the idea, but then the whole isolation of COVID and becoming a mother for the first time made me super lonely at times. It got me thinking about the human need to connect.”

The two main characters were born out of the director’s observations and “interesting people” she met and read about. In the almost seven years it took to get the project off the ground, Menart worked on other films such as “My Last Year as a Loser,” but continued to think about the story and work on research. 

“In Slovenia, the production process is quite long,” she notes. “It takes a while even after getting financing to secure co-producers, financing from abroad and so on. I always worried: will this theme even interest me six years from now? Because making a film is a marathon.”

Little could Menart know that the themes of her film would only become more relevant in the years since, especially as the rapid advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence amplified conversations around loneliness and the need for human connection. “Humans are connecting more and more with machines, while on the other hand slowly realizing how important it is to spend actual time with each other.”

As major discussions around the male loneliness epidemic and how young men are being seduced into the dark corners of the manosphere and red-pill movements due to an increase in isolation, Menart offers a careful observation on how loneliness affects young women. “Everything That’s Wrong With You” broaches questions on the burden of caring, the pressures of coupling up and bearing children and the hypersexualized universe of online dating. 

“I’m a woman, and that’s the perspective that feels like home,” says the director when asked about why she decided to focus on two young women. “And, to be honest, I think women live more interesting lives [laughs]. We have it harder, but our lives are very rich and unexamined still. We’ve had wonderful films and novels in the past decades dealing with the interior lives of women, but I still feel like there is still so much that is left unexplored and so many interesting characters that still haven’t been able to speak to the audience. So someone else can make a film about the male loneliness epidemic, I’m all for it, but it’s not going to be me [laughs].”

Menart always knew her film would hinge on the casting of the two main actors. “I wanted actors from Slovenia because language is very important to me, and that meant our pool of actors was not huge,” she notes. “I still wanted to do open auditions, so I urged everyone and everyone’s friends to send in self-tapes to see what we would get.”

Funnily enough, the two stars sent in tapes for the opposite characters. This, the director says, made her realize that “they each brought in an aspect of their personality that maybe would be missing in the script for the character.” After casting was completed, Menart spent a year working with the actors on developing their characters and adjusting the script accordingly. 

Another key aspect of the production was finding the perfect location for Alja’s home, which ended up being the small German seaside town of Heringsdorf. “I was really attracted to this flat landscape, which is something we don’t really have where I am from,” says the director. “I also wanted to have a big contrast from where Maruša comes from, which is all very steep and claustrophobic. I wanted to have this feeling that when she arrives at this other location, everything opens a bit.”

“It was a bit of a challenge because it is a tourist town that doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the making of a feature,” she adds. “There was no space to park trucks, so we had to be very agile and work with smaller vans and not a lot of equipment, very minimal lights. But it actually suited me very well. It’s a small story and very intimate, so I wanted to be flexible and I couldn’t plan everything ahead.”

Speaking of intimacy, Menart wanted to work with a cinematographer with a documentary background, who “would approach this shoot as more of ‘let’s catch the actors doing something’ instead of ‘let’s make the actors do something.’” When she met Dutch cinematographer Roy van Egmond through a producer friend, she “connected immediately.” “It was important for us to have this great conversation between the camera and the actors so that the camera would enter the intimacy of this very close relationship. We felt we needed to have this little cocoon of people who really understood one another.” 

As for having the world premiere of the film in Sarajevo, Menart says she is “really happy” to be back at the festival after presenting “Everything That’s Wrong With You” as part of CineLink, Sarajevo’s industry arm. “The festival is like a joyful high school reunion of the whole region, and they were so supportive of the film while we were making it. It feels perfect.”

“Everything That’s Wrong With You” is produced by Slovenia’s Vertigo in co-production with Germany’s Chromosom Film, Tidewater Pictures, Serbia’s Living Pictures and RTV Slovenija. It is supported by the Slovenian Film Centre, MV Filmförderung, Film Center Serbia, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, Creative Europe MEDIA, the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, and Re-Act Co-Development Funding. In collaboration with Film Studio Viba Film.