A Matter of Life and Death

A bittersweet romance about a couple dealing with terminal illness and the preciousness of time.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

OR someone who believes that, in the grand scheme of things, time moves in a cyclical loop rather than being defined by linearity, a viewing of John Crowley's We Live in Time marks an ironic end to 2024 at the movies.

A film that underscores the finitude of moments available to us as individuals and for the ties that bind us with other living beings on Earth as opposed to the perpetual flow of time in general in the cosmos.

The tagline of the film goes—every moment counts. It is about how time is of the essence for the young couple, Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield) and Almut Bruhl (Florence Pugh).

Interestingly, Nick Payne's innovative screenplay plays with time and the element of memory, taking us back and forth through various vignettes of their ten-year-long relationship.

From intimate scenes of cosy domesticity to the exciting, anticipative ones of the upcoming childbirth to the sombre realisation of the inevitability of death and the concomitant bereavement.

On the face of it, there is no pattern or logic to the arrangement of these scenes but they stack up well eventually to turn the emotions of the relationship tactile for the audience.