Florence Pugh is equally at home in contemporary and historical, independent and blockbuster films. She is especially known for her role in Oppenheimer, one of the two films that saved cinema in 2023. We Live In Time is yet another change of pace for Pugh, as Almet, a driven classical chef who runs into Tobias (Andrew Garfield), an about-to-be-divorced man on the verge of emotional collapse. Tobias falls heavily for Almet and he wants marriage, children and a house with a white picket fence. Almet is not so sure. Because We Live In Time is told non-sequentially we know from the start that Almet and Tobias do have a child and live in bucolic splendour in a cosy cottage. So watching them negotiate from point A to point B has zero dramatic tension. To give the movie more heft than ‘‘will the pretty people live happily ever after’’, Almet is given cancer. We Live In Time is framed as a love story so it takes a while to realise how much this is Pugh’s film. Almet is the character who changes the most over the storyline and it is Pugh, the actor, who lets us under Almet’s skin when her type-A personality has her behaving stupidly and selfishly, putting her career and ego before her family. You should hate her for it, but Pugh lets you get it.
By Christine Powley
