We Live in Time, an A24-funded romance starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, is set to have its debut at TIFF. Here’s the trailer!
One of the most brilliant screen debuts I’ve ever seen was, no doubt, Andrew Garfield’s performance in the movie Boy A. While largely obscure now, in this British indie, Garfield played a young man re-entering society after fourteen years in a juvenile prison for a heinous crime. The movie never really reveals his crime until we, as an audience, have absolutely fallen in love with this sensitive, kindly young man, and it’s one of the most potent explorations of society’s failure to allow former prisoners to rehabilitate themselves that I’ve ever seen.
Since then, Garfield has become a big star thanks to his underrated turn as Peter Parker in the Marc Webb Spider-Man films, with Spider-Man: No Way Home teasing the fact that his time in the spider-verse may be far from over. He’s also done modern classics like The Social Network and Martin Scorsese’s Silence, but now is re-teaming with his Boy A director John Crowley for what looks to be a touching romance, We Live in Time. In it, he stars opposite one of the hottest young actresses to come along in years, Florence Pugh.
In the trailer, we see Pugh’s Almut and Garfield’s Tobias have a unique meet cute, with her hitting him with her Mini Cooper, leaving him hospitalized with multiple broken bones and contusions. When she arrives to apologize, he immediately turns on the charm, and soon, the two are madly in love, with them having a child and juggling their careers, with her a chef on the rise. But, as the trailer teases (in tear-jerking fashion), when Almut receives an ominous diagnosis, time may not be on their side, leaving both to make the most of the time they have left.
Certainly, this looks like a real winner, as Garfield and Pugh are electric to watch in almost anything they do (Pugh was superb in the largely unseen A Good Person), and this looks like a lovely, old-fashioned romance – a Love Story for 2024. The movie is set to have its world premiere at TIFF, and it marks something for a comeback for Crowley. His romantic drama, Brooklyn, established him as one of the biggest directors of the moment, but he stumbled with his big-budget follow-up, The Goldfinch, which got murdered by critics at TIFF a few years ago. It’s cool that he’s coming back, Rocky-style, to once again show how good of a director he is (seriously – Boy A is a masterpiece), and I’m all for it.
We Live in Time hits theaters on October 11th, 2024.