We Live in Time review – Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh charm in heartfelt weepie

Toronto film festival: there are two excellent performances at the centre of a time-hopping romance that tackles well-trodden ground with maturity

There was a warm late summer surprise to be had with last month’s surprisingly thoughtful and tender adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s supermarket bestseller It Ends With Us. It was a proud and powerful resurrection of the sort of glossy melodrama that had grown terribly unfashionable, mostly demoted to the small screen and almost always the subject of easy derision. Its shock commercial success (nearing $300m globally) will undoubtedly lead to more but already, premiering weeks later at the Toronto film festival, we have another heart-over-head weepie in We Live in Time, a smart and sensitive crowd-pleaser that should prove similarly irresistible to an impassioned yet underserved audience.

There’s also a touch of the golden era Working Title romcom here, before that formula became harder to love and easier to parody. It’s a tale of attractive, sweary Londoners flirting and falling in love but here they’re also grappling with some knottier, less cosy issues. It’s no spoiler, given both the trailer and the film’s time-jumping structure flitting back and forth, that it’s also about late-stage cancer, a development that has become something of a red flag given the rote nature of many disease-of-the-week dramas. But Irish stage and screen director John Crowley, who found his biggest success with 2015’s Brooklyn, has found a way to breathe life into a film about death, not aiming for wheel reinvention exactly but confidently relying on the power of big, honest emotions and two A-game stars who can easily sell them.

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