‘The New Years’ Review: The Story of Us (MUBI)

It’s about ten years out of date,” a friend of mine — a little more jaded than I am — said after watching the first episodes of The New Years. And yes, he had a point. But I couldn’t help falling under the spell of that slightly anachronistic mood the series carries, drenched in songs by Nacho Vegas, McEnroe, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro, Vetusta Morla. The story begins in 2015, and maybe that’s why it clings to that vibration — close enough to feel like yesterday, far enough to already look like a faded photograph. Is there really such a thing as a 2015 aesthetic for TV series, the way there are 2015 clothes, 2015 haircuts, 2015 phones? I don’t know. Maybe the series leans into the past because we all tend to polish it in hindsight, imagining it as a kinder time, a time when everything still felt possible.

The New Years lives in that initial idealization. Over the ten years it spans — one per episode, always between the last day of the year and the first of the next — you sense from the beginning that you’re about to witness a long arc of rise and fall, of shifts and reversals, of joy and bewilderment, of hope and its eventual bruises. You know where it’s going even before you know the details, because most love stories, as the saying goes, don’t end the way we wish they would. And yet you slip into Ana and Oscar’s skin, surrendering to the ritual. That’s the game Sorogoyen and his team invite you to play: a personal portrait that’s also a generational one, a story that speaks less about love itself than about how time rearranges love. About what survives. About “how the years change everything.” Or something along those lines…

There’s a strange blend here — a touch of Linklater, a touch of Jonás Trueba (the latter unmistakable, starting with the casting of Francesco Carril) — and The New Years follows both what happens and what doesn’t in the lives of a guy (Carril) and a girl (Iria del Río) who meet one New Year’s Eve, drifting from one party to another, and connect almost instantly. He was born on the last day of the year, she on the first, a small coincidence that feels like a sign. And from that coincidence the story starts taking shape. Ana is about to leave Madrid to study abroad but changes her mind. Oscar, a doctor, is seeing someone else, which quickly complicates things. They look at each other from across rooms, across silences, and by the third episode — one littered with small and not-so-small mishaps — they’re together. From there on, the decade unfurls.

Released internationally a year after its run in Spain, the series arrives through MUBI, a platform that in some way seems to be courting the very people it portrays. There’s this quiet sense of communion between the medium, its viewers, and its characters, as if all three belonged to the same slightly bruised generation. Formally, the show is more conventional than most of MUBI’s offerings, but that’s not where the connection lies — it’s in the sense of speaking directly to people in their thirties and forties, people who will likely recognize themselves, more or less painfully, in the lightly Truffaut-like misadventures of Ana and Oscar, Oscar and Ana.

Across the decade come family gatherings, drunken nights, lapses, parents, friends, frictions, sex, fleeting moments, doubts, reconciliations, and fresh wounds. The New Years works — and quietly moves you — because the actors and their characters are almost inseparable: charismatic, vulnerable, the kind of people you root for even while sensing, from early on, that life won’t be as simple as they believe when their story begins. They’re around thirty, still feeling that everything is about to start. And from those fragile instants of joy and panic, affection and loss, this yearly visit to two days in the life of Ana and Oscar takes shape. As someone once put it, “Funny thing about time: it always knows how a story ends before we do.”