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By David Pountain
Directed by Patrick Vollrath
Everything Will Be Okay, the slow-burning short from Patrick Vollrath, expands upon the knowingly empty platitude of its title – a trite, humouring reassurance – to engage as a tense, uncomfortable demonstration of the controlled ways in which adults interact with children. The director of this German father-daughter drama understands the commonly assumed obliviousness of kids and the belief that they will go along with anything so long as you speak to them and express your emotions in the correct manner. Everything Will Be Okay exposes the limitations of this notion as the wrongness of the father’s actions slowly, if vaguely sink in to the child’s perspective.
The father in question is a man named Michael, who opens the film waiting by the gate to his ex-wife’s house with increasing impatience to pick up his eight-year-old daughter Lea for the weekend. When Lea finally comes to the gate with her mother, Michael greets her with a cutesy “˜hello’ and whisks her off in his car. At first this looks to be your typical ‘weekend dad’ meet-up. Michael awkwardly tries to catch up on Lea’s school life and competes for her affections by spending too much money on presents. But it isn’t long before the gradually mounting impression that something isn’t quite right starts to emerge and Lea is only one or two steps behind the audience in this realisation.
The handheld camerawork lends a raw immediacy to the proceedings as the increasingly irritable Michael drives his daughter from place to place in a curious hurry, as though there are a multitude of factors he’s constantly having to balance in his mind without letting his anxiety show. Lea’s uninformed, involuntary journey raises the question of where the limits are on a parent’s right to determine the life of their own child, with the final irony being that Michael’s stubborn, possessive, ask-no-questions treatment of his daughter reveals his own childishness. He becomes a progressively more pathetic figure across the film’s 30-minute running time but sympathetically so. Perhaps the greatest success of Everything Will Be Okay is in how it captures the desperate, delusional, selfish panic of a man in those moments where he feels the person he loves the most start to slip away.
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