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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.

Against a unifyingly momentous milieu — namely, the wintry week of...