‘We Live In Time’ is a good, old-fashioned romantic comedy… but with a twist. As the title suggests, the time factor plays a crucial role in this tearjerker in which we surprisingly see from the outset that terminal illness plays a role in the narrative that unfolds. But we are kept guessing as to the course of events in that we see the end, middle and beginning of a relationship, with pregnancies, first dates and the last stages of life all thrown into the mix in a way that at first seems confusing but soon makes sense for, as in life, we are always interrogating events from having only partial information at hand as to how a life will proceed.

We don’t necessarily imagine when we meet someone, for example, that the relationship will be cut short by death from cancer while a partner is in their thirties, and we are always at the mercy of fate. We make plans for the future without knowing if they will proceed according to schedule, and we see this here in the way that a wedding plan is sabotaged not just by the terminal prognosis but by a timetable clash once it is revealed that Almut (Florence Pugh) wants to tick an event off her bucket list – she’s a chef and she secretly enters a major European culinary event and gets through to the final, which inconveniently is scheduled for the same day as her wedding.

This is a film that is adept at showing how, in unexpected ways, past and present dovetail, and we are privy to happy moments – such as the birth of their daughter – interspersed with contrastingly depressing moments with a cancer diagnosis that precedes the time they consider starting a family, and then returns once their daughter is just a few years old. There is a focus on the prosaic here – it is everyday life in all its sublime and ungainly moments, here often juxtaposed, that forms the template of what is an engrossing story, at once highly relatable and also one where we genuinely don’t know how it will play out, despite the many clues offered from the time hopping that is integral to ‘We Live In Time’.

It is not a perfect relationship, and nor does it pretend to be, and this is why we can so easily cherish the foibles, breakdowns but also the uplifting moments that come from the darkest of places. What do we do when death is imminent? Is it okay to make rash decisions and to follow a path that may not align with what medical experts or partners think is right? As Almut points out in one crucial scene she doesn’t want her daughter to grow up not knowing that her mother had an ambition which societal pressures and expectations made her suppress. Are we defined by our careers or by our families, and what is the price to be paid for prioritizing one over another? There is an emotional, if not a chronological, logic to the events that proceed, and ‘We Live In Time’ is a deft, emotionally textured study of the need we all have to both live in time yet fight against it, perhaps requiring some form of immortality through our children, our outputs, our career successes, and the mark we make on those around us.