We Live In Time, in the hot-seat

A lovey-dovey timey-wimey tale

We started of 2025 with one of my most personally anticipated movies of a long time: We Live In Time. Starring a two piece with possibly the most famous capacity for emotion and romance in the game, able to break our hearts in a single frame, and earning a true secret ingredient for artistic greatness by encapsulating the human experience so vastly, we experience a shared lifetime, a love story. 

I dare to think of all the crowds who have sat in cinemas, drawn in by an immediately captivating title – which, by the time the credits fall, I believe you can interpret in two, equally delightful, ways. 1) We Live IN Time, meaning time is going to do its thing. Its magical, beautiful, insensitive, sometimes maddening, thing. It’s going to pass and speed and slow and, worst of all, end, without giving you any indication of its plans. We just get to be there. Exist. Time has the reins. Time is what takes this earth for a spin. We have the pleasure of being taken on a whirl, on a whim. If we think that time has its plans and we, in all our individuality of desire and hope and personality and character, have essentially nothing to do with it, it makes it easier to ‘Live’. If what is going to happen is going to happen, and was always going to, might as well make it worthwhile.

2) We Live IN TIME. The blip that is a lifetime is a mind-bending idea as it is, even more contortion then when you realise that your ‘Time’, your chance, is now. Through no choice or effort of your own, I’ll say it again, you get to be here. All the opportunities and experiences and relationships and possessions that come your way would never become if not for God or the universe or whoever or whatever giving you what you got. Almut got this one life and she lived it just in time for her dad to introduce her to figure skating, to create an epic passion project in the form of a restaurant, to share a dream, to meet and fall for the love of her life, to be a mother. Just in time to do all of it. And the stars that had to align for that to happen are the other lives that, by chance, touched hers, each as miraculous as the next. Therefore, it stands to reason that there is not a weak link in this cast, each and every interaction with a new person is filled with a sparkling light.

I must give credit to two supporting actors in particular, however. First, Grace Delaney, who does much to prove that good things come in small packages in her performance as, daughter, Ella, giving an incredibly natural performance with excellent confidence and presence. The saying never work with children or animals has been around for what feels like forever, attempting to cast this shadow over the place a child actor has on a set or amongst a call sheet. On a similar plane of existence, performers like the wonderful Lee Braithwaite, who plays beautifully the part of Almut’s sous chef, Jade, navigate under the weight of perceiving eyes and senseless questions of their place portraying characters within the gender binary when they themselves identify outside of it. Braithwaite portrays Jade with a beautiful tenderness and effortless friendly warmth, in a subtle yet impactful performance which allows her to hold within her that theme of connection so deeply intertwined into the fabric of the film. These cast members are both vital components to the project, arguably the people who hold the stars together when they are apart from one another.

One must picture Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, the experts in expression that they are, walking this earth filled to the brim with not only an uncanny capacity of emotion but the talent to control it. Keeping it at bay on the regular, presumably offering it up to a select few lucky loved ones, and then when the moment calls for it feeling it build up and sit its full weight forward behind the gateway, before they let them burst out! The gateway, of course, being the eyes for Garfield and the mouth for Pugh. I can’t explain that it’s just a known fact. All to say that these two are a marvel to behold, taking out film fanatic by film fanatic, tearing down our carefully built walls.

There are pieces of cinema which are undeniable art and as such open in their wake conversations of visually stunning achievements in lighting or composition or its ability to overwhelm with sheer scale. On the other side of things, we have pieces like this one – defined more by the feeling of life, the art of capturing the spontaneous and natural, where what you take away is so much more than just a song stuck in your head or an ingrained aesthetic – epic feats in themselves but completely apart. The repeated use of montage in this film does much in proving the power of the intangible, with overarching focus devoted to building upon emotion. Whilst this could be misconstrued as underwhelming, in actuality, it is just real. I don’t know when mundane became a dirty word but I think this project proves its innocence and, more to the point, its worth, as a piece of cinema that is not escapism but perhaps quite the opposite.

A typical romance, in every way turned up to 11, the film spans the moments in life that become the stories we tell each other over and over again, and just as we don’t hold ourselves to telling these stories in perfect order, neither do Payne and Crowley. As such, We Live In Time holds in it the precious feeling of inspired memory and the lingering dreamy state that inevitably follows in its stride. In a brilliantly written screenplay, Payne manages to maintain a pleasing dose of the unexpected to create a clear, fluid narrative, stimulating from beginning to end as Crowley makes our constants so strong that we at no point question our ability to withstand all of that, bringing to life these characters made of such minute, intricate, loveable, important details, enhanced in the clarity of what they represent.