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Anyone with a scrolling habit will know that social media can be a soothing place for the downbeat and lonely. Yet the intimacy you can strike up with strangers rubs up against the uncomfortable fact that our online
personae are always manipulated to an extent. Writer-director Urša Menart’s luminous Sarajevo competition title “Everything That’s Wrong With You” doesn’t dismiss the potential power of our virtual bonds so much as it recognizes that they operate by a strange and slippery set of rules. Mernart’s sophomore feature, following the 2018 dramedy “My Last Year as a Loser,” continues her exploration of the zillennial blues, offering a Slovenian riff on female friendship indies like “Frances Ha,” grounded by the sweet-and-sour chemistry of its leading ladies.
In the wake of her mother’s death by cancer, Maruša (Anuša Kodelja), a Daria-esque brunette with a piercing deadpan, finds solace in the bubbly-bleak content produced by wannabe influencer Alja (Klara Kuk), a cute-core blonde who wryly broadcasts her mental health struggles to her followers. When Maruša slides into Alja’s DMs, the two begin texting nonstop as Maruša empties out her mom’s apartment in Ljubljana, settles her debts with former friends, and tenuously reconnects with her cranky father and his family in the Lithuanian countryside. But instead of heading back to Berlin, where she lived before her mother’s illness, she spontaneously takes a bus — the longhaired dachshund she inherited from her mother in tow — to a destination that Menart reveals upon her arrival: the German beach town where Alja lives by herself.
Against the backdrop of this handsomely melancholic coastal setting, whose empty offseason cinematographer Roy Van Egmond captures in desaturated pearl-blue tones, “Everything That’s Wrong You” tracks the transition of the women’s friendship from the screen realm to the more precarious IRL one. At first disaster seems likely when wild-child Maruša shows up to Alja’s neatly maintained apartment unannounced, startlingly blasé about imposing her company through the New Year festivities.
Their relationship, against the odds, blooms over bundled-up beach walks and cozy nights-in where the two quip about yearning for lobotomies and wanting to put their “brain[s] in bleach.” The mousier Alja is enlivened by Maruša’s no-fucks-given approach to life, finding in her new (and perhaps first ever) bestie the kind of relationship she thought only happened in movies; Maruša, who mutters about the liars and cheats she used to know in Berlin, is game to play the ride-or-die, dragging Alja out to boozy parties, sharing earbuds, and breaking into the luxe abode of the married man who broke her heart. Kuk and especially Kodelka shine with naturalistic charm in this delicate two-hander, their easy chemistry making credible the rapport between Maruša’s grungy cynic and Alja’s snuggie-wearing neurotic.
This black-pink yin-and-yang frays as time together reveals the depths of each character’s dysfunctions, and their camaraderie veers into codependence. Alja, who works at an elder care facility, is a bit too eager to host the freeloading Maruša. Her health problems and submissive, self-effacing nature have left her friendless beyond the guys she meets through dating apps, putting Maruša in a situation where she’s playing caretaker to a new loved one while still grieving the last person she tended. And as Maruša pushes back her departure again and again, Alja’s behavior becomes more erratic — dark and deeply sad revelations that Menart tempers with a delicately irreverent sense of humor.
The camera loves Maruša’s pink-puffer-clad dachshund a bit too much, so the duo’s climactic fallout unfolds just as expected, and with a resolution that borders on situational comedy. Menart’s script does a fine job of building out these jagged women with a sharp eye for the growing pains of flesh-and-bones relationships born from the seed of virtual connection. It’s the winsome performers that give this modest film an extra punch to perhaps launch it beyond its regional context.
