Slovenian director Urša Menart’s sophomore feature premiered this month at the Sarajevo Film Festival’s competition programme, a co-production between Slovenia, Serbia, and Germany that arrived at a particularly urgent cultural moment. Yet the film’s real insight lies not where most of us expect—in diagnosing the problem of online personas—but in recognizing something far more complicated: that the collision between who we perform online and who we are in person can become a strange kind of catalyst for growth.
Everything That’s Wrong with You follows Maruša, a woman in her mid-twenties adrift after her mother’s death, who finds unexpected connection with Alja, an online nurse-turned-influencer she discovers while scrolling. Their bond feels genuinely real—born from shared struggles and a particular dark humor about suffering—yet it exists entirely within a mediated space where Alja has curated and presented a version of her life. When Maruša impulsively decides to visit over New Year’s Eve in a small German coastal town, the machinery of their digital intimacy confronts physical reality. What worked on a screen suddenly becomes awkward, fragile, impossible to maintain.
This is where most commentary stops: at the moment of disillusionment, when followers realize their influencer is merely human, or when both parties recognize they have been relating to incomplete versions of each other. Menart refuses this landing. Instead, she understands something more precise: these women are not simply being dishonest. They are being partially honest while protecting other parts of themselves. What you see of Alja online is real—it just isn’t the whole picture. The same is true for Maruša.
What makes the film’s perspective so sharp is its recognition that neither woman wants what happens to happen. Alja maintains her curated warmth, her influencer-friendly version of someone managing both illness and grace. Maruša projects an impenetrable coolness that masks devastation. Both are straining against exposure, working to keep up a performance they know is incomplete but also necessary. This is the true subject of the film—not the fakeness of social media, but the exhausting labor of partial authenticity, and the psychological cost of holding back pieces of yourself to keep an image intact.
Cinematographer Roy Van Egmond frames this struggle in desaturated pearl-blue tones across the winter coastline—a palette that mirrors the emotional restraint both characters maintain. The performances from Anuša Kodelja and Klara Kuk are remarkably still, operating in glances and silences more than speech. Kodelja’s Maruša has a Daria-like deadpan that operates as armor, while Kuk’s Alja maintains a performative brightness even in small moments alone. Their physical distance across rooms, their careful management of eye contact—Menart’s direction tracks the work of these partial selves through visual language rather than exposition.
When the rupture comes, it’s not because one reveals a shocking truth about the other. It’s more fundamental: the boundaries that made their connection manageable simply collapse. Suddenly, they must face what neither wanted to face—the possibility that being actually known means showing the parts that don’t fit your narrative. The film’s genius is refusing to resolve this through cathartic confession. Instead, growth happens quietly: in accepting that the version you’ve presented is real, just incomplete. That Alja’s brightness and Maruša’s detachment were never lies—they were just parts of a whole person who was still learning how to exist.
That’s what makes Everything That’s Wrong with You necessary now, when discussions of online culture tend toward either celebration or moral panic. The film doesn’t dismiss the performance, nor does it condemn it. Instead, it suggests that the real work—the growth, the actual connection—begins exactly when the performance becomes impossible to maintain, and you discover you’re still worth knowing even when stripped down to your actual, contradictory self.
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