Fools will love it: We Live in Time reviewed

We Live in Time is a rom-com (of sorts), starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. They have terrific chemistry and elevate the material by around 1,000 per cent (a conservative estimate), but it’s still deeply annoying. It’s a weepie – a cancer story as well as a love story; at some screenings tissues were handed out beforehand. But though I am a crier by nature, my tears were not jerked. I checked – and double-checked: eyes dry as anything. I couldn’t get beyond the phoniness. You might do better.

Pugh (Almut) is an ambitious, high-end chef about to open an ‘Anglo-Bavarian restaurant’ serving ‘Douglas fir parfait’. (Each to their own.) Garfield (Tobias) works at the opposite end of the food spectrum, for Weetabix, although quite what he does at Weetabix isn’t clarified. I can only say it never seems to involve going to work. (If you are ever offered a job at Weetabix, take it.) Their meet-cute happens one night when she hits him with her car. The chocolate orange he’d been carrying ‘didn’t make it’ she tells him when he comes round in hospital.

He does not grieve the chocolate orange – but he is immediately smitten. We, however, don’t learn this until some way into the film because the story doesn’t proceed in linear fashion. It’s told in vignettes, in which we hop back and forth in time. It’s like going through a box of muddled photographs and working out what year it is by the clothes, hair, living arrangements. Oh, that was before they had the baby. Oh, that was after they moved from a stylish London flat to a chocolate-box country cottage lit by an implausible number of candles – isn’t all this too bougie and unaffordable anyway? I’m not sure what this fractured structure hoped to achieve, but the result feels like scrolling through an influencer’s Instagram account.

We visit them at key moments in their relationship. We see the meet-cute, the birth of their daughter (a great scene, to be fair), how they nearly broke up, how she teaches him the best way to crack eggs, which seemed like the worst way to me. (Two bowls are really not necessary.) And throughout it all we know it’s doomed as one of the opening scenes has a doctor telling them her ovarian cancer has returned. (Not a spoiler; we know this right from the off.) That’s the bad news but the good news, I suppose, is that it’s cinema cancer rather than cancer cancer. It even propels her to her greatest achievement in the culinary world – during which scene, I was wondering: isn’t the chemo making you as sick as a dog?

As happens when it’s cinema cancer, she remains beatific throughout. No rage, no terror, no fear. The jumbled chronology allows them to skip all this, just as the film also skips the actual business of dying. Allowing cancer to be this charming is horribly fake. She is beautiful throughout. She has a buzz cut in preparation for the chemo, looks adorable, never stops looking adorable, and doesn’t lose her hair anyway.

Pugh and Garfield are A-listers for a reason, and make sufferable what would otherwise be insufferable. But I’m not sure I was taken with their characters either. She is monstrously selfish while he is dopey, always hanging around with tears in his eyes when he should be at work. (This Weetabix will shift itself, it seems.) However, not even their star power can distract from the brazen emotional manipulation at play. I suspect this will be a big hit among those who are easily taken in. For the rest of us? Phony – and deeply annoying.