I recently went to the theaters and watched the so called “romantic comedy” We Live In Time. I had heard many reviews that gravitated me towards this movie, the most common being that it was one of the most devastating movies of this time. I was intrigued by this and it got me to thinking what exactly about this movie could have so many people upset? After seeing the movie for myself I can confirm that it was one of the most heartbreaking films I have watched in my life. Heres why…

We Live In Time takes the viewer on a journey between two people (Almut and Tobias) and their love story. We see how they met, how they fought, started a family, built a life together, and then ultimately how they watched it fall apart due to cancer.

Something used frequently in this movie were flashbacks. The movie didn’t have a typical structure. Instead of having a storyline that is set in one time and moving forward, this story line went back and forth from the past and the present. Doing so, the depressing story of Almuts slow death due to cancer is emphasized. We as viewers get to see what Almut and Tobias’ relationship could have been, we get to see how happy they were before the storm, and we get to see how that all went to shit and their lives were turned upside down. So the use of flashbacks really took the viewer on an emotional rollercoaster making it a really hard watch.

Something that was a significant part of the conflict in the flashback scenes in this film were their debate about having children. The fact was that Tobias wanted children and Almut did not. Early in their relationship Tobias confronted Almut about her unwant of children and this turned into a big conflict between the two characters. After a while Almut changed her mind as she fell deeper in love with Tobias and they decided to go on a journey together of starting a family. This wasn’t as easy as they thought as they went through fertility struggles. The movie would cut from scene to scene of negative pregnancy tests until finally there was a positive. This was one of the happiest and most sad moments of the movie. Of course it was happy to know that after all of their struggles they finally had success and were going to start a family together. However at the same time, this is what makes this moment so upsetting when the movie cuts back to the present. We get to see how they raised their daughter and how their family that they worked so hard to start would ultimately be torn apart by this tragedy.

There was one scene in the movie that I thought was really brilliantly done was one of the last scenes in the film. Almuts cancer had gotten extremely bad and she and her family knew that she wasn’t going to make it. She had been working towards a bake off competition throughout a majority of the film, but decided to leave this competition to spend the night with her husband, and young daughter. They decided to go to an ice skating rink together as she used to be an ice skater and wanted to reconnect with her past self with her family. There was one shot when Tobias and their daughter Ella went off on the ice together. They turned back and Almut was standing there watching them. They stared at each other for a long time and the shot got farther and farther away from Almut. This shot was one of the most devastating and beautifully orchestrated shots in the film. It signified the tie breaking from their family, and how Tobias and Ella were moving on without her. The next scene Almut wasn’t shown. It wasn’t ever adressed that she died, but we all knew.

This goes into my last favorite part of the film, another aspect that really had the audience grabbing tissues. There was a very specific shot in the beginning of the film when Tobias and Almut had just met. Almut being a baker, she taught Tobias how to bake with certain techniques such as cracking an egg with only one hand. The final scene in the movie shows Tobias and their daughter Ella at the same table, but now Tobias was teaching Ella how to do those techniques that Almut had taught him. It was full cicle and told us without having to actually tell us, that Almut was gone. This scene really did it for me as a viewer, and I thought it was beautifully done.