‘The New Year That Never Came’ Review: A Tragicomic Tangle of Romanian Lives at the End of an Era
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Many a short film that is later expanded into a feature feels reverse-engineered for that specific purpose: an eye-catching taster of what is clearly intended as a larger work, though perhaps not wholly satisfying as a miniature.
Bogdan Mureșanu‘s much-lauded 2018 short “The Christmas Gift” — a European Film Award winner for best short film, among other accolades — didn’t seem such a case.
Poignant and darkly funny as it evoked a child’s-eye view of political terror via an inadvertent act of protest, it was a perfectly self-contained detail of a wider historical canvas.
In Mureșanu’s complex, involving debut feature “The New Year That Never Came,” however, “The Christmas Gift” is cleverly recontextualized as one of several intimate, integrated vignettes, composing a fraying tapestry of Romanian social and political turmoil in the country’s final days of communist rule.
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