This Time Next Year: Routine Rom-Com Prompts New Year’s Auld Lang Anxiety

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

It’s entirely possible that This Time Next Year was directed not from a script but from a diagram labelled “How to Make a Rom-Com” with “meet-cute,” “awkward first kiss,” “inevitable conflict rooted in basic misunderstanding,” “wisecracking friend,” “gloomy break up,” “sound advice from seasoned elder” and “will-they-or-won’t-they” as headers.

Indeed, the film is so spectacularly formulaic that, at one point, would-be love interests Minnie and Quinn openly verbalize their cliched characteristics to each other without a shred of irony.

“I'm sorry about what happened at the farm... I got scared because, usually I disappoint people. Hurt them. Lose them from my life.”

“What makes you think it would be the same with me?”

“Because it's always the same with me.”

“You do know this whole tortured loner routine is a bit old fashioned? ‘Poor me, I don't know how to love.’ Nobody actually writes men like that anymore.”

“Well, I'm sorry for being such an outdated character trope. What about the trope about the kooky heroine who, for some reason, can't see how incredible she is? How beautiful, how kind. Funny.”

Kiss… and… cut! The scene is a huge missed opportunity for sly, self-effacing comedy. But perhaps the squib in the trailer announcing that This Time Next Year was directed by the “legendary editor” — emphasis mine — of Love Actually, Notting Hill, and About a Boy should have suggested that novelty was unlikely to be found here.

And yet, it’s a testament to the charisma of leads Sophie Cookson as Minnie and Lucien Laviscount as Quinn that the film, based on the novel by Sophie Cousens, who adapted the screenplay, isn’t a complete misfire.

There’s just enough subtle humour and sexiness swirling about in a storybook London tourists hope to find but never do to make This Time Next Year watchable even if you feel a bit cringey doing it, knowing as you do exactly where you’re headed.

The story. It’s New Year’s Eve 1990 and two women are about to give birth in the same maternity ward. Rich baby boy Quinn wiggles from the womb just ahead of Minnie, thus being anointed that year’s flagship New Year’s baby.

Quinn’s mum opportunistically nicks his name (conjures the luck of the Irish, apparently) from Minnie’s mom who had planned it for her baby girl but, as they say, you snooze in warm, nurturing amniotic fluid, you lose.

So begins what Minnie and her mom Connie (Monica Dolan) deem as the first in a lifelong series of also-rans and random misfortunes owing to the lost name. Sweet, goofy Minnie, who runs a struggling pie shop with her besties, just can’t seem to get a foothold on anything of consequence. Until, well, you know.

As adults, Minnie and Quinn meet at a New Year’s Eve party, launching their very slowly building romance which unfolds amid other, mostly minor crises propelling adjacent characters, before we are carried to our inevitable conclusion. On New Year’s Eve, of course. Enter fireworks, real and figurative, and a teensy twist alert viewers likely already twigged. The end.

To its credit, the film has heart and committed performances, among them from Scotsman John Hannah of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, who knows his way around a classic rom-com, and Charlie Oscar as Minnie’s droll, perennially snazzily outfitted sidekick, a twist on the standard gay male pal who gets all the best lines. So, there’s that.

A subplot about Minnie and Quinn’s moms rediscovering each other and burying the hatchet is swell even if — it physically hurts to write this — the idea hinges on the point that money isn’t everything and even rich people can have issues and be sad. The revelations never stop.

That’s sarcasm. But you won’t find much in This Time Next Year or many other deviations from the standard, unironic rom-com playbook. This is as close to a grilled cheese on white made with Kraft Singles as a movie can get. Comforting in its way but so blandly familiar.

This Time Next Year. Directed by Nick Moore. Starring Sophie Cookson and Lucien Laviscount. Available on VOD, iTunes and other streaming platforms March 7.