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.