Stream It Or Skip It: ‘An Unforgettable Year – Winter’ on Prime Video, In Which A Young Woman Overcomes Her Fears And Finds Herself While On Vacation In Chile

An Unforgettable Year – Winter is the second film in a four-part Brazilian series produced for Amazon Prime Video based on a best-selling YA book of the same name. The book featured four short stories written by four different Brazilian authors, each based around a season. All the big themes of young adulthood, from romance to family commitments to changing friendships are touched on in this smart and sensitive film adaptation of writer Paula Pimenta’s original short story.

AN UNFORGETTABLE YEAR – WINTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A teenage girl standing at the top of a snow-covered mountain holds a stack of papers in her hands. One by one, she tosses the pages up into the air, releasing them into the cold winter wind which carries them away.

The Gist: Mabel (Maite Padilha) is in her final year of high school, and as the film begins, she packs a suitcase full of summer clothes for he school’s class trip. She and her two best friends, Malu and Mage (together, they’re the three M’s) are thrilled for one final moment of glory together. Cut to… Mabel stepping into the snow in her sandals. Instead of letting her go on her class trip, her parents made plans for their family to take a ski trip deep in the snow-covered mountains of Chile. Mabel is not happy about any of this and has major FOMO since her friends are off frolicking at the beach, so she unhappily settles in to her snowy vacation.

Mabel is hesitant to hit the slopes, so instead, she visits a local bookstore, where she learns about a writing contest. As she roams the ski resort in search of inspiration for a story to enter in the contest, she happens across a group of teens around her age who all seem to be cool, intellectual, artsy, non-conforming types. She trails them and sees them engaged in some kind of ritual in a cave, they’re wearing capes and initiating one another into… something. Mabel is desperate to make her story about whatever this is, so she slowly infiltrates the group, taking ski lessons with one of them, Benjamin (Michel Joelsas), and socializing with the rest until she gains their trust. (She slowly develops a crush on Benjamin, too.)

It turns out, the friends are not a cult, just a really supportive group, and they retreat to this cave wearing long hooded capes to sign their names to the wall of the cave when they do brave, fearless things. After one girl, Julia, comes out to her mother, she signs her name. Another, Renata, walks named through the ski resort naked to prove to everyone she’s not ashamed of her body. Mabel is told that she can sign her name to the wall too, for conquering her fear and skiing down the most intimidating mountain, but she refuses, telling them that doesn’t warrant any kind of reward or attention. She asks her crush Benjamin why he never signed his name to the wall either, and he, too, says he hasn’t earned it.

In hanging out with these new friends, Mabel finds the inspiration she needs to write a story, but she essentially uses all of their stories of bravery, and loss, and triumph, as the narrative thread. She sees it as a tribute to her new friends, but they accuse her of writing about their secrets. Ben especially takes it hard; Mabel has written about the grief he overcame after the death of his brother who drowned and is incredibly hurt that she would use his pain for her creative outlet. He runs off, disappearing into the mountains because he’s so angry that she’d pass off his story as her own. When Ben is found, he’s unconscious suffering from hypothermia, and he refuses to see Mabel. (It turns out, Ben blames himself for his brother’s death. As a child he went swimming in a lake and, being unable to swim to shore, his brother died trying to save him, so Ben has had a fear of swimming ever since. This will factor in later.)

Mabel goes to the top of the mountain, and we see the scene that played at the beginning of the film, only now it has more context: she releases the pages she wrote about her friends. Her words fly away with the wind, and she returns to her hotel room to create something new, a book she collages together featuring her favorite art, poems, and entries from her own diary: Mabel in her own words. She may not have won any contest, but at least she was able to find the words to tell her own story. When she’s finished, she signs her name inside the cave.

After Ben reads Mabel’s new book, she takes him to her one happy place: the pool. It’s the one place she goes to relieve her anxiety, but ever since Ben’s brother’s death, he hasn’t gone swimming. But there, with Mabel, he overcomes his fears and swims with her. Water, rebirth, yadda yadda.

As Mabel prepares to leave the resort and head home to her regular life, we see Ben sign his name inside the cave too. As Mabel departs on a bus with her family, she gets a text from Ben, it’s a photo of his name painted on the cave wall, with the word “Obrigado” written below it. “Thank you.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At a certain point, the film started to remind me of the recent film adaptation of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Mabel is at least five years older than Margaret and navigating more mature issues like love and leaving home for college, but like Margaret, she’s struggling to find a bridge between the old life she loved, filled with comfort and ease and familiar friends, and her new identity, which was forged out being forced out of her comfort zone.

Our Take: An Unforgettable Year – Winter defines “coming of age story,” and while it falls back on plenty of familiar tropes, it feels modern; there are enough details throughout that make it feel fresh and interesting. From Mabel’s diverse group of new friends, who go around quoting Sarte and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and embrace their queerness and their artsiness, they’re all outliers, but each feels well defined beyond just playing an archetype.

Even though the movie is based on a young adult novella, it feels mature (I really don’t know a ton of teens who read, let alone quote, poets and philosophers the way these teens do) and complex, yet it’s an emotionally satisfying arc. Mabel and Benjamin don’t necessarily end up together, but they found themselves, individually, because they met.

Sex and Skin: One of the members of Mabel’s friend group walks naked through the resort to prove she’s not ashamed of her body in an artsy, performative statement, though the camera only skims across her body briefly.

Parting Shot: As Mabel drives off, she receives a text from Benjamin with his name written in the cave.

Sleeper Star: Guilherme Terreri stars as Glauco, the gender-fluid leader of the cool kids Mabel meets. Glauco is full of poetry and confidence and one-liners, and instills into Mabel that it’s okay to be different and embrace whoever she is inside.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Tonight, I’m gonna be the best daughter ever,” Mabel tells her father after having a heart to heart and realizing that in her quest to find herself, she’s been pushing her parents away. “You already are,” her dad reassures her.

Our Call: STREAM IT! An Unforgettable Year – Winter is easily the most interesting and thoughtful of the Unforgettable Year films, but beyond that, it’s a smart and heartfelt coming of age film that doesn’t overdo the “girl triumphs by finding romance,” theme, and instead places allows Mabel to triumph by finding herself.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.