We Live in Time

The romance's unconventional structure is a bold if risky bet

Romance films have become cliches having staid and predictable structures. However, filmmakers have been trying to re-energize the genre, approaching it from different angles. The Worst Person in the World (2021) tried to create an “anti-rom-com” and now We Live In Time (2024) attempts to play with structure.

We Live in Time is the love story of Brits Tobias (Andrew Garfield) a divorced IT executive at a cereal company and renown chef Almut (Florence Pugh). Their story is told out of chronology, as we jump across various moments of their life. We see them conceiving their child (Grace Delaney), undergoing chemotherapy for Almut’s cancer, and attending a chef’s competition in Italy amongst other things.

We Live in Time is Irish director’s John Crowley’s first film since the box office bomb, The Goldfinch (2019). Crowley returns to the genre that first launched him to fame with Brooklyn (2015). In We Live in Time, Crowley attempts to take on the modern romance structure and approach it in a Nolan-esque way, chopping up the timeline and scrambling it in the editing room. This staves off the staleness that romance stories usually deliver. Crowley, thus, places the intrigue of We Live in Time not in the story, but on the characters instead.

Thankfully, Crowley has two performers oozing with chemistry in Pugh and Garfield. Both British actors are electric from their first moments on screen, carrying the first half of We Live in Time. These performers’ charisma is such that viewers becoming willing to simply watch them park a car. However, as we enter the second half, the structural experiment becomes less refreshing, and more of a gimmick.

The reliance on character likeability can only take you so far in a film’s runtime, you begin to wonder what the stakes are and what Crowley is trying to say. We Live in Time’s second half bares the weakness of its premise when it puts an emphasis on a cooking subplot, while the core romance is set aside. Crowley needed to choose, whether to employ a structure that has the plot unfold comprehensively or to stick to an experiment that transmits slice-of-life memories instead. This switch in the last act, emphasizing plot over character, makes the second half sag with a dragged pace and an underwhelming finale.

We Live in Time’s character development proves uneven as well. Almut is a rich character that Pugh plunges into with dominance. Tobias, by contrast, is an incredibly bland counterpart. Little attention is paid to his background, personality, or motivations, instead becoming a crutch for Almut’s journey. Romances can choose to have one protagonist, but We Live in Time is set up to be a two-hander. Garfield salvages his character thanks to his charm, but when you dig into Tobias as a person, you see the blankness, leading to uneven character arcs.

In the end, We Live in Time is a bold experiment, trying to find a new take in the romance genre. The film’s first half, with its unconventional structure and electric leads is its strongest and irresistible. However, as the runtime lengthens the film’s faults begin to make themselves known, undoing much of the work and goodwill that Pugh and Garfield crafted.

6.9/10