Knock on Wood

The first time director John Crowley collaborated with Andrew Garfield was for 2007’s Boy A, a film about a young man trying to navigate life after exiting a juvenile prison. 17 years later, they’re working together again for We Live in Time, which, while ostensibly a romantic comedy, is just as emotionally heavy as the duo’s first collaboration.

This time, they’re joined by Florence Pugh, who plays Almut to Garfield’s Tobias, who, at the beginning of the film, is in the final stages of a divorce from a wife we never see. This makes Tobias ideally positioned for a new flame; when Almut hits him with her car, it’s the perfect meet-cute.

Now, the film’s narrative is nonlinear. Within the first half hour or so, we see our leads meeting, years later with a child, and even more years later finding out that Almut has an aggressive form of cancer — hence the emotional weight.

While its heart is firmly in the right place, the film’s arrangement can be scattershot at times. The main thematic focus of each moment in time is substantial enough to sustain a level of resonance, but Crowley instead opts to hit you all at once, with each emotional high and low flowing right into each other. They end up being too distinct to really hit. It feels like, “And this is the section where she has cancer, and this is the section where they talk about having kids, and this is the section before they’re a couple,” et cetera, et cetera.

But thankfully, Garfield and Pugh (who manages to elevate such dull movies as Don’t Worry Darling and A Good Person solely thanks to her inherent magnetism) are each such earnest performers that it’s hard to come out of the movie not feeling anything, even with the whiplash it brings. They have such effortless chemistry, and their performances show the nuances of what it’s like for the characters to exist in different time periods. While the actors do sell each and every romantic and personal moment, keeping them from being overly schmaltzy, Garfield and Pugh excel when the movie wants to be a rom-com. Setups like their meeting in the hospital after the accident, trying to get out of a tight street parking spot while Almut’s experiencing contractions, or an absolute highlight sequence at a gas station, show that perhaps these two actors who are known for expressing the depth of human hurt should be in more movies where they get to be silly and carefree.

So even with a structure that’s frustratingly inconsistent, the greater frustration is that there are such compelling themes, ideas, and performances that ideally would have been done a bit more justice. It’s about more than appreciating the little things. When We Live in Time does hit home, its central theme that impeding death (of yourself or a loved one) should not stop you from accomplishing things in life, encourages us to go live and allow our individuality to flourish.

We Live in Time will open in limited theaters on October 11, before expanding to a wide release on October 18.