Sometimes you just want to be a little bit silly about it. Not every film needs to challenge you, unsettle you, or leave you staring at the ceiling at 2am wondering about the human condition. Sometimes you need a ridiculously attractive cast, a predictable love story, and absolutely zero shame about any of it.
Every Year After delivers all of that with a grin on its face. It’s the kind of romantic drama that knows exactly what it is, doesn’t apologise for a second, and is somehow more enjoyable for it. The premise is classic: two people, years apart, a love that keeps pulling them back together. You’ve seen the bones of this story before. You don’t care.
The leads share a chemistry that feels genuinely effortless, which is rarer than you’d think in a genre flooded with Netflix originals that mistake brooding for tension. Here, there’s actual warmth. The banter lands. The longing feels earned rather than manufactured by a sad piano score and slow-motion rain.
“It’s unashamed about being exactly what it is,” one viewer put it neatly on Reddit. “I watched it in one sitting and I’m not even embarrassed.”
And that, really, is the review. The film clocks in at just under two hours, moves at a brisk enough pace that it never drags, and finds room for a handful of genuinely tender moments amid the glossy nonsense. There’s a scene somewhere around the 40-minute mark that’s quietly devastating in the best way possible.
Yes, the plot relies on a few contrivances that would make a script editor wince. Yes, the secondary characters exist mainly to dish out advice and raise their eyebrows. Yes, you will see the ending coming from roughly the opening credits.
None of that matters in the slightest. Every Year After is sweet, handsome, and thoroughly enjoyable in the way that only something unashamedly frivolous can be. It doesn’t try to be more than it is, which, in 2025, feels almost radical.
The real question is whether we’ve become too snobbish to admit we need films like this, or whether we’re finally ready to stop pretending we don’t.
