Florence Pugh & Andrew Garfield Shine

Amongst right this moment’s younger performing abilities, few possess the enviable mixture of depth and charisma shared by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, who play to these appreciable strengths as a recent British couple who discover themselves going through a medical disaster in John Crowley’s deeply introspective We Dwell in Time.

Handed its world premiere on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition, the place Crowley’s 2019 drama, The Goldfinch, was much less enthusiastically acquired, the movie eschews a standard, linear strategy to the subject material in favor of a looser development that weaves collectively a vivid patchwork of timeframes and recollections to deeply poignant impact.

For thematic inspiration, Crowley takes his cue from the Lou Reed music “Magic and Loss (The Summation),” and particularly the lyrics, “There’s a little bit of magic in every little thing after which some loss to even issues out,” in navigating the connection between passionate, formidable Almut (Pugh) and delicate, attentive Tobias (Garfield).

Assembly one another of their 30s as fully-formed people with well-defined pasts and a transparent sense of their desires and wishes, Almut and Tobias proceed to arrange home in South London’s verdant Herne Hill. She’s the chef in her personal restaurant, and he, nonetheless uncooked from a divorce, is the company advertising and marketing face of Weetabix cereal.

Regardless of differing on wanting to boost a household — he’s raring to go, she’s uncertain — they finally find yourself having daughter Ella (Grace Delaney) after some problem getting pregnant, and would appear to be residing an idyllic life when Almut receives a devastating prognosis: a recurrence of ovarian most cancers.

Relatively than taking a standard “the place can we go from right here?” strategy, the distinctive script by playwright Nick Payne is extra involved with “how did we arrive at this place?” The movie divides their story into three distinct time durations of various lengths and re-splices them collectively in methods extra fascinating than customary chronological order. The strategy permits for a collection of pretty/shocking/amusing moments, from Tobias getting the again of his neck tenderly trimmed by his doting dad (Douglas Hodge) to Almut laying in a bath, balancing a biscuit on her very pregnant tummy to — in one of many movie’s extra audaciously choreographed sequences — giving delivery in a petroleum station lavatory.

It’s all immersively recorded by cinematographer Stuart Bentley’s pictures, which penetratingly captures the defining moments within the couple’s decade-long relationship with out ever feeling intrusive. Fairly frankly, Bentley wouldn’t have been required to do rather more than merely level and shoot, what with the generosity of these gorgeously trustworthy performances given by Crowley’s two extremely achieved leads.

There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the display. However in addition they refuse to shrink back from letting their characters’ much less engaging qualities bleed by means of. Beneath Tobias’ soulful eyes there’s an undercurrent of passive-aggressiveness that isn’t his greatest function. In the meantime, Almut’s silky-smoky voice can’t gloss over the painful frustration the illness is inflicting her when she insists on collaborating in a prestigious worldwide cooking competitors regardless of her deteriorating situation and her husband’s issues, protesting, “I don’t need my relationship with Ella to be outlined by my decline.”

When that decline in the end results in the tragically inescapable and time reverts again to its chronological default, Crowley takes depart with the identical tender but truthful contact that informs the whole manufacturing. Whereas We Dwell in Time and its subject material won’t lay declare to the viewers uplift of Crowley’s Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, seldom has such an unflinchingly trustworthy tackle mortality felt so transcendently life-affirming.