We Live in Time (2024)

We Live in Time arrives from A24, a studio whose name usually signals a certain set of cultural commitments, and proceeds to ignore nearly all of them. John Crowley's film follows Tobias and Almut across a decade of courtship, childbirth, and illness, shuffled into a nonlinear order that critics spent more column inches debating than the couple's actual fate. It is a romance of the old school, the kind where people weep in hospital corridors and crack eggs as a metaphor for instruction. The leads are charming. The carousel horse became a meme. That is the film.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is white, British, and assembled without visible effort toward anything else. The romance is heterosexual and stays that way. No queer thread disturbs the proceedings. Almut does carry a modest charge of autonomy: she is a chef who refuses to let cancer dictate her final chapter, choosing a cooking competition over quiet decline and insisting her daughter remember her as accomplished. It reads as character, not catechism. The film advances no thesis about gender, only a woman with opinions about her own body and a deadline.

The remaining categories sit empty. Race goes unmentioned. The climate is whatever waits outside the cottage. Nobody eats a rich person. Bodies are discussed in terms of tumors, not acceptance. Neurodivergence does not appear. History is not revised because history is not consulted. As for sermonizing, the film is too busy being sad to lecture, and more than one reviewer dismissed it as regressive, which is its own kind of verdict. The result is a well-acted weepie with almost no interest in the cultural conversation of its own moment. A rare vintage, and a thin one. Decant carefully.