Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The New Years’ On MUBI, Where A Relationship Is Examined Via A Decade Of New Year’s Eves

In The New Years, an acclaimed limited series from Spain that is currently streaming on MUBI, a couple’s relationship is examined over a decade, with each episode taking place on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, starting in 2015 and ending in 2024.

Opening Shot: A man comes out of a stall in a bathroom at a club. His girlfriend is waiting for him.

The Gist:  It’s New Year’s Eve 2015, and the girlfriend, Vero (Lucía Martín Abello), also has someone else at the club with her: Her ex, Óscar (Francesco Carril). It’s been seven months since they broke up, but she thinks not spending New Year’s with him would be “weird.” But Óscar, still sad over their breakup, wants no part of a friendship with Vero.

At the same club, Ana (Iria del Río) is bartending; some friends are on the other side of the bar celebrating one of their promotions at work. Just after midnight, Ana gets off work and goes to a dinner with friends, who surprise her with a birthday cake. She was one of the first babies born in Madrid in 1986, so it’s her 30th birthday. Friends give her a huge red suitcase in anticipation of her move to Vancouver, for which he already has a visa.

Ana and Óscar cross paths at the restaurant, and there’s a spark. Then they get in the same taxi, both headed to an afterparty at the apartment of one of Ana’s friends. At the party, Ana finds out that Óscar was one of the last babies born in Madrid in 1985, and as the overnight turns into the morning, the two of them find themselves talking to each other a lot.

On a whim, the two of them get into a car with two of Ana’s friends, headed to Valencia, but then they get out when the couple headed there almost get into an accident while arguing. Óscar and Ana then go to his place, where their attraction to each other becomes physical.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The New Years, created by Sara Cano and directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, has a similar vibe to the series One Day, which examines a relationship during a particular day over a number of years.

Our Take: There is plot within each episode of The New Years, but because each episode examines how Ana and Óscar’s relationship plays out over a decade’s worth of New Year’s Eves and New Year’s Days, there’s room for things to be a little loosey-goosey. What we mean by that is that the episodes are definitely as much a slice-of-life as they are an examination of a relationship.

Despite a lot of overlapping, naturalistic dialogue and a seemingly easygoing pace, the first episode of The New Years establishes a lot about Ana and Óscar. She’s a bit rootless, living with roommates, working a job she hates, and thinking that this sojourn to Vancouver will be a good start, though she has had the visa for eight months and hasn’t made travel plans. He’s an internist and seems to be a bit more settled, but he feels his job is in constant turmoil, he’s not over the breakup with Vero, and he is yearning for some adventure in life.

So the two of them are entering each other’s universes at a good time, it seems. As the show revisits them each New Year’s Eve, we’ll see where their lives are and whether they’ve spent that year together, apart, or somewhere in between. It helps that del Río and Carril have good chemistry with each other, else seeing the two of them getting together as they get older would feel like people making the same mistake over and over again.

Could the storytelling be tightened up a bit? Yes, and we’ll explain an example of that below. But we’ll forgive the languid pacing of the first episode, given that it develops just how much time the pair spent together the day they met and how their chemistry evolved over those hours.

Performance Worth Watching: You usually don’t see an entire sex session from beginning to end in a series. But the first time Ana and Óscar have sex shows the chemistry between del Río and Carril. It’s a little hot, a little awkward, and over pretty quickly — just like in real life. And they show that just getting to know each other applies to the physical as well as the emotional.

Sex And Skin: We just described the lengthy sex scene between Ana and Óscar, which we thought was remarkably realistic for a scripted series.

Parting Shot: Ana and Óscar go their separate ways outside of his building; he finds out from Vero that her friend was stabbed, and she has to get home. They hug, but who knows when they’ll see each other again?

Sleeper Star: Various friends come in and out of the pair’s universes, but none of them make a lasting impact, given that the focus of the show is on Ana and Óscar.

Most Pilot-y Line: As a contrast to the brand-newness of Ana and Óscar, we get a glimpse of Ana’s friends as they drive Ana and Óscar to Valencia — or at least start to — and we’re not quite sure why the scene is there other than to give an obvious contrast between the new pairing and a longtime couple.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The New Years keeps its storytelling relatively simple, focusing on the main characters as we peek in on their evolving relationship over a decade.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.