‘The Year Between’ Tribeca 2022 Review – A Dark Comedy That Doesn’t Live Up To Its Potential

One of the biggest risks a filmmaker, or any storyteller, can take is making their central character unlikeable. Although I’m a firm believer that every main character doesn’t have to be palatable to the audience, the character must be compelling and possess a quality that will keep viewers invested in watching them accomplish their goal.

In The Year Between viewers are introduced to Clemence (Alex Heller) a troubled college student who opens the film by terrorizing her passive and innocent college roommate. She’s stunned seconds later to discover her roommate has resorted to calling her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) to pick her up. Hours later, Clemence finds herself dragged back to her childhood home to get herself and her mental health under control.

Her father (Steve Buscemi) is happy to see her. Her younger siblings (played by Emily Robinson and Wyatt Oleff, respectively) are less than thrilled to have their troubled older sister back at home draining their parents resources.  Clemence moves from one ridiculous situation to another without any lesson being learned. She gets a job, then gets fired for stealing. Attends a party with her teenage siblings and makes a complete fool out of herself. She reconnects and begins hooking up with a former high school classmate who now sells drugs to her siblings classmates. We also see her attend therapy sessions to get a hold on her mental health and bipolar disorder, and gaining nothing useful from the sessions. While she may not excel at life, she does excel at spiraling uncontrollably. It isn’t fun, it’s just tragic and disturbing. 

This movie had so much potential. Exploring mental health issues through the lens of a young woman who uses her sarcasm and humor as a way to cope, and ultimately realizing that she has to face these issues to progress in life and truly connect with her family, would have been such an entertaining story. It could still be a dark comedy, but with a serious message at its core. In this incarnation, Clemence makes it hard to care about or root for her.

The movie also, and rather uncomfortably, frames the mental health in a comedic light. While many other stories have accomplished this in a way that toes the line between serious and funny in just the right way, there’s nothing funny about how it’s handled here.

All that being said, I do owe kudos to the lead, Alex Heller. The Year Between is her first feature length film, and one that she directed and wrote in addition to starring in. It takes a lot talent to do even one of those things, and the fact that she balanced all three during the making of this process is a testament to her commitment as a storyteller. While I ultimately feel like this film didn’t quite stick the landing for me, I’m sure it will for someone else. I look forward to checking out some of Heller’s future work.