How much of a decade with another person survives when the archive shrinks to ten isolated hours of memory? Spanish miniseries The New Years (Los Años Nuevos), created by Rodrigo Sorogoyen with co-writers Sara Cano and Paula Fabra, treats this question as its starting wound. The show builds a ten-part structure on absence. It opens on New Year’s Eve 2015, with the chance encounter of two thirty-year-olds: Óscar (Francesco Carril), a medical internist dragging himself through a breakup, and Ana (Iria del Río), a restless bartender who has lost her sense of direction.
They recognize a small, slightly absurd symmetry in their lives; their birthdays sit on either side of the calendar’s hinge. Óscar arrives on New Year’s Eve, Ana on New Year’s Day. From that coincidence, the series follows their intense, flawed, repeatedly interrupted relationship through successive years between 2015 and 2024. The formal rule that restricts each visit to this night turns New Year’s Eve into an annual tribunal, where the past remains mostly hidden but passes judgment all the same.
The Cartography of Unseen Years
The series finds its force in an almost ascetic structural rigidity. Each of the ten episodes limits its gaze to a narrow temporal island, approximately one hour around a successive New Year’s Eve or Day. The creators avoid the familiar rhythms of episodic television.
Major life events such as new jobs, promotions, breakups and sudden crises take place in the 363 days that fall between episodes, outside the camera’s direct gaze. The show refuses the feel of an edited highlight reel that tracks progress. It presents precise slices of these lives instead, like water samples drawn from a twisting river, each one registering the current, often murky state of the flow without describing the full route.
Rhythm stays patient, moving with the unhurried pace of ordinary time. This rejection of spectacle creates a feeling of lived reality. Scenes settle into single, enclosed spaces such as a fraught dinner party, a shared flat, a crowded club in Madrid, Lyon or Berlin.
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The structure loads an enormous weight onto conversation. Dialogue becomes the main instrument of excavation, pushing the characters to mention or half-mention the emotional history that has built up in the silence between episodes. Viewers listen for these traces and assemble the unseen years from hints of pain, small betrayals and rare, hard-won moments of closeness. The present stretches under tension while the past drifts nearby like a ghost, which gives the series much of its quiet force.
The Anatomy of a Mismatched Partnership
Everything rests on the connection between Óscar and Ana, a partnership shaped by attraction between order and volatility. Óscar the doctor clings to routines and stability, an image of the human impulse to carve structure out of flux. Ana moves with a mercurial energy that suggests constant re-invention and a kind of magnetic instability. Their bond becomes a long test of the capacity of these opposed temperaments to sustain any enduring tie across a decade, romantic or friendly or suspended in an uneasy middle ground.
Actors Iria del Río and Francesco Carril take on a strangely difficult task. Their work needs enough open vulnerability to make the relationship convincing, yet they almost never inhabit the peak moments of change. They carry those turning points in weary eyes, guarded posture and conversations that move slowly around the things that hurt most. External shifts in the characters, including new hairstyles or the sudden appearance of face coverings in later episodes, signal deep internal movement.
The series studies familiar wounds: failed attempts at mutual understanding in love, the weight of childhood memories that refuse to fade, the cruel exposure that comes with speaking about personal trauma. It lingers on the stretched, uncertain passage from the tail end of youth into the uncomfortable early stages of adulthood. The people around Ana and Óscar shape this passage. Friends, partners and family members act as mirrors that reflect damage, fatigue and the difficult, partially earned growth of the central pair.
Framing the Existential Distance
Directors Rodrigo Sorogoyen, David Martín de los Santos and Sandra Romero use framing and staging to press the existential weight of time into every space the characters occupy. They turn away from cinematic spectacle and stay with grounded sequences, where control of the room feels exact and sometimes suffocating. The choreography of bodies and glances has a quiet precision, even when the action never leaves a single interior.
A recurring visual strategy uses the wide-angle lens as both experiment and weapon. In crowded parties, the frame bends and swallows figures, echoing the confusion of a life that seems to rush past faster than anyone can register. During quieter scenes or slow walks, the same lens gathers Óscar and Ana into a tense, almost forced unity. When either character stands alone, the image often leaves them small inside the room, which strengthens the sense of isolation that clings to them regardless of their romantic status.
Time sits as the real subject. New Year’s Eve becomes an obligatory point of self-interrogation, the night when the cost of the previous 363 days stands in front of each character and refuses to move. The series recalls the conversational intensity of Richard Linklater’s Before films while leaning toward a harsher vision. It insists that a decade offers no guarantees, and that each turn of the calendar strips away another layer of protection from private fears. The project plays less like conventional serialized television and more like a long, difficult piece of cinema about love and time.
The New Years (Original Title: Los Años Nuevos) is a 10-episode Spanish drama television series that premiered in its home country on Movistar Plus+ on November 28, 2024. The series became available to stream in the United Kingdom and other territories through MUBI starting on December 3, 2025, with new episodes releasing weekly. This critically acclaimed work, which was screened at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, follows the relationship between Ana and Óscar over a ten-year period, with each episode focusing on a single New Year’s Eve/Day.
Full Credits
Title: The New Years (Los Años Nuevos)
Distributor: Movistar Plus+, MUBI (UK/US/International)
Release date: November 28, 2024 (Spain, Movistar Plus+), December 3, 2025 (UK, MUBI)
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: Approximately 40-60 minutes per episode (10 episodes)
Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Sandra Romero, David Martín de los Santos
Writers: Sara Cano, Paula Fabra, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Marina Rodríguez Colás, Antonio Rojano
Producers and Executive Producers: Alberto Félez, Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Cast: Iria del Río, Francesco Carril, Pablo Gómez-Pando, Ana Telenti, Carlos Blanco, Paula Iglesias, Vladimir Perran, Lucía Martín Abello, Marina Rodríguez Colás
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Alana Mejia, Lali Rubio
Editors: Alberto del Campo, Mario Sierra, Regino Hernandez
Composer: Juan Ibañez
The Review
The New Years
A profound and structurally brilliant exploration of intimacy over a decade, driven by superb performances and an uncompromising realism. It is emotionally dense and philosophically resonant, cementing its status as essential, artful cinema.
PROS
- The high-concept, time-fragmented episodic format is original and highly effective.
- Francesco Carril and Iria del Río deliver powerful, perfectly nuanced performances that sustain the entire narrative.
- Provides a deep, painful reflection on aging, the loss of youth, and the nature of enduring connection.
- The use of subtle staging and visual techniques, like the wide-angle lens, reinforces the thematic weight.
CONS
- The consistently gradual, "real-time" pacing can feel demanding and slow for some viewers.
- The lack of traditional plot events requires a high degree of commitment from the audience to infer history.
- A key emotional conflict for one protagonist in the latter half feels slightly too explicit compared to the surrounding subtle realism.
