We Live In Time isn’t a weepy romance, it’s an anti-feminist tragedy
The new, highly anticipated romantic drama trades in several damaging tropes that are pervasive in cinema and are harmful to women and queer people. It may be marketing itself as a weepy romance, but we should see it as an utter tragedy – for Almut, for feminism, for queer women, for us all.
Spoilers ahead!
When my partner and I finished watching We Live In Time, the highly-anticipated, much-buzzed-about romantic drama starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, my partner sighed “That gave me feelings” – a statement my logical computer scientist love sometimes says in slight accusation when I make him watch something sad or romantic or filled with yearning. “That was sad,” he continued, waiting for me to jump in with a monologue of opinions and emotions and thoughts, as I usually do the second the credits start rolling on a film (occupational hazard of me being a film critic and him dating one) – but this time I didn’t. He looked over at me expectantly, to find me sitting with my arms crossed, jaw clenched, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
I bristled. “Yeah, it gave me feelings too. It made me so f*cking angry.” Director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne weren’t aiming for that. No, they wanted to make me weep, maybe even sob. Instead, I fumed and raged.
The internet’s favourite actors, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield star as Almut and Tobias, a couple who meet, fall in love, marry, have a child, and then are faced with the horrible reality of Almut’s experience of cancer and the terrifying decisions and realities that they must confront – except, not in that order. Told in several timelines that weave in and out of each other, a scene near the beginning of the film shows the couple in a doctor’s office being told Almut needs an “aggressive treatment plan” for her recurring cancer. The film then flashes forwards and backwards, showing us the couple’s meet-cute, their developing romance, their expanding family, and the different stages of Almut’s illness and treatment, including the sometimes devastating decisions she has to make.
As we start the film seeing the couple together facing the possibility of Almut’s mortality, the stakes are immediately high and we are immediately invested in this couple. The light moments of their courtship feel all the more gorgeous because we know of the difficulties they face later, the chances they take feel braver and more meaningful because we’re aware of how precious their time together is, and the insights into their personalities shape our understanding of how they process Almut’s illness. Beautiful, tiny moments become layered with meaning: in the beginning, we see Tobias taking almost obsessive notes at Almut’s doctors’ appointments. Later in the film, a flashback shows us how Almut attended her first doctor’s appointment alone and meticulously took down everything she was told. Tobais’ early note-taking isn’t a sign of his innately organised personality – it’s something he has learned to do out of love; a skill acquired under the most awful of circumstances so the woman he loves has one less thing to worry about.
The structure is beautiful and so are the performances. As Tobias, Garfield is warm and vulnerable, bringing beautiful emotion to the unspoken. Love, pain and anticipatory grief often flash across his face as he goes through the heart-wrenching experience of watching a loved one in pain, on a trajectory that he can’t stop and can’t control. His adoration for Almut is clear – and there’s much to admire. A headstrong, ambitious overachiever, Almut was once a champion figure skater and is now a renowned chef. Hardworking and strong, she knows who she is and isn’t ashamed of it. When she and Tobias sleep together for the first time, he hasn’t brought condoms so she gets some for her nightstand, remarking to him about his “low expectations” of the date. The next morning, Tobias sees photos of her ex-girlfriend – a small moment that made my queer heart leap. Representation of bisexual women is still so lacking, and too often hypersexualised and fetishising. Seeing a brilliant, grounded, funny, ambitious bisexual woman onscreen, with her sexuality being presented as normal and in no way negated by her long-term relationship with a man, gave me such high hopes for the film and Almut as a character – and Pugh, as ever, delivers. Pugh’s Almut is funny, no bullsh*t, emotionally intelligent, sex-positive, brave, and a fully-rounded person long before she meets Tobias, with dreams and ambitions that lie outside of romance, outside of marriage, outside of motherhood. The latter two aren’t even on her radar – one of Tobias and Almut’s biggest rifts emerges when he reveals that he wants children, while she definitely doesn’t – another character detail that had me dancing in my chair with excitement.
Was Almut the independent, bisexual, anti-heternormative, childfree female character that I’ve been waiting to see at the centre of a mainstream movie? Was an A-lister in a highly anticipated popular film going to show us that women don’t need to conform to heteronormativity to be happy? Ha, no, of course, they kill her. In fact, they make her die for heteronormativity and motherhood.
The film – written and directed by men – tells us that the bravest thing a woman can do is give up her life to get pregnant and give up her dreams for motherhood. It tells us that women don’t know their own minds when it comes to having children. It tells us that queer people can’t have happy ever afters. And it tells us that smart, independent, ambitious, career-driven women should not prioritise their dreams or be known for their skills, but instead prove themselves as good and noble by dying for motherhood.
We Live In Time trades in several damaging tropes that are pervasive in cinema and are harmful to women and queer people. One is the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope, where queer characters onscreen are statistically more likely to die than their straight and/or cis counterparts. This trope has several effects, including treating queer characters as more expendable than straight characters; implying that queer lives are inherently marked by tragedy (which perpetuates associations of queerness, death and depravity such as another particular trope, the ‘Tragic Aids Story’); and failing to give onscreen representation of queer people living fulfilling, happy lives adds to bigotry and negative attitudes towards queer people. Introducing Almut as bisexual only to kill her contributes to a long history of bisexual women dying onscreen – a 2024 Autostraddle article counted 240 deaths of queer, bisexual and lesbian women onscreen, showing how prevalent the trope is.
In this film, women absolutely cannot have it all. They may be capable of it all, but they should and will drop it for motherhood.
Another trope perpetuated by We Live In Time is the idea that women who don’t want children simply don’t know their own minds and will inevitably change their minds and move towards motherhood as if it were an inevitable fate, a natural role, a biological imperative. Almut is unequivocal in her lack of desire for children, revealing that it was the reason for her last break-up. When Tobias brings up the topic of having children early in their relationship, wanting to know where she stands, Almut isn’t tentative or ambivalent – she’s angrily certain. “I’m just not someone who’s interested in making that kind of promise. And in fact, there’s a little bit of me that thinks ‘f*ck you’ for even asking.” But when Almut gets diagnosed with cancer and is presented with her treatment options (the inaccuracy of cancer treatment and representation in the film is another essay), she is told that a full hysterectomy is the safest course of action, comes with much less chance of recurrence, and will likely save her life. This should be a no-brainer: a young ambitious woman with big dreams, much life to live, and no desire for children should opt for the safe route of the hysterectomy. Yet Almut chooses not to, deciding that she does want children after all – even if having a child literally kills her. Which it ultimately does, and she’s diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer after she’s given birth. Her sudden whiplash decision to have a baby has cost her her life – and we’re meant to weep for her bravery, not for the tragedy of women being told to value biological motherhood over their own lives.
This trope of unruly, childfree woman suddenly changing her mind and realising that all she wants is motherhood is prevalent onscreen. I’ve lost count of the number of female characters who experience an accidental, unwanted pregnancy and never consider abortion as an option (Lane and Rory in Gilmore Girls, Haley in Modern Family, Amber in Parenthood, Rachel in Friends, Jane in Jane the Virgin, I could go on), and more examples of women who openly declare they don’t want children entering an abortion clinic only to have a last-minute change of heart, deciding that a lifetime of being sure of themselves was just a phase and actually they want to give birth after all (Miranda in Sex And The City, Juno’s adoption plotline in Juno, Cindy in Blue Valentine). This trope of childfree women suddenly deciding to have babies perpetuates the idea that women don’t know their own minds and can’t be trusted to make decisions over their reproductive health and choices.
This attitude is genuinely dangerous and leads to real women having their autonomy and choices doubted, undermined, coerced, forced and ignored. In Ireland, women who want to have abortions are forced to undergo a three-day waiting period before they can have the procedure – a waiting period that has no medical reason, and is based only on the idea that women don’t know what they want and might change their mind. Women who want or need hysterectomies are often refused on the assumption that they might change their mind and that their general health is less important than their ability to bear children – and this valuing of women as vessels for pregnancies rather than individuals in their own right is a lethal societal issue.
As Irish people know, Ireland’s historic valuing of pregnancies over the lives of women has resulted in the deaths of women, notably Savita Halappanavar who died of sepsis after she was refused an abortion to end a prolonged miscarriage. In the States, since the 2022 overturning of Roe V. Wade, there has been a dramatic rise in maternal mortality rates, which is consistent with how maternal mortality rates rise dramatically when abortions are made illegal. According to analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute on the impact of Texas’ 2021 abortion ban, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period. Officially, at least four American women have died as a direct result of Roe V. Wade being overturned, but the real number is likely much higher as patients and doctors underreport due to stigma and fear of prosecution.
Pregnant women are being refused treatment, care and even the chance to live in favour of protecting sometimes non-viable pregnancies. This patriarchal idea that women are valuable only as pregnancy-carrying vessels and not as worthy human beings literally kills women – and is perpetuated by pop culture that treats women who sacrifice their lives for the possibility of pregnancy as being noble, admirable and good.
Almut begins We Live In Time as an ambitious, independent, happily childfree woman. Instead of celebrating that, the film orients her towards heteronormativity, marriage, motherhood and the most literal form of self-sacrifice and tells us that this makes her a good person. They take a wonderfully strong, quietly unruly feminist and push her back towards ruly traditionalism. They tell us that a woman with big ambitions will eventually understand that her life is worth less than motherhood. Of course in the film, this is all presented as Almut’s choice – but the choices that female characters are presented as making influence how we think of women’s choices in real life. The more we see women onscreen being lauded for sacrificing themselves spiritually or literally for motherhood, and the less we see childfree women living happy and fulfilled lives, the more our social narratives and attitudes will continue to associate women with motherhood, and childfree women with selfishness and deviancy.
At this point, you may be crying “It’s only a movie!” at your screen, to which I would respond with two things. One, who do you think you’re reading? Overanalysing pop culture and going into deep-dive feminist analysis is my thing. Two, movies are never just movies. Movies and pop culture are representations of ideology, of social narratives, they exist within a cultural context and contribute to not only social discourse but the attitudes and beliefs that underlie laws and politics.
We Live In Time does not exist in a vacuum. It exists within the history of cinema, which has a long history of killing bisexual women, punishing childfree women, and portraying motherhood as women’s only path to maturity, fulfilment and goodness. And We Live In Time exists within the current cultural and political moment, which is a time where abortion and reproductive rights are being rolled back in the States and remain inaccessible to many women; where the misogynistic manosphere is pushing ideas of traditional femininity and submissive motherhood onto generations of men who are told to hate feminism and who gleefully chant “your body, my choice” at women; and a society where biphobia still impacts bisexual women, who are at a higher risk of mental health issues and sexual violence.
And not for nothing, but for a film that claims Almut is brilliant for being a competitive chef and champion figure skater and who wants to be remembered for her accomplishments, it doesn’t let us see her win the cooking competition she enters or actually show off her skating skills. Both plot points are abandoned so she can be with her family and then die. In this film, women absolutely cannot have it all. They may be capable of it all, but they should and will drop it for motherhood.
We Live In Time is presented as a romantic drama about a good woman sacrificing her life for childhood, and my reaction was an enraged, furious, ‘What a waste.’ Of Almut’s life, of a progressive plot, of the opportunity for a film to show that ambitious, childfree, queer women deserve to want to live, and to have a happy ending. We Live In Time is an example of the insidious conservativeness that pervades pop culture. It may be marketing itself as a weepy romance, but we should see it as an utter tragedy – for Almut, for feminism, for queer women, for us all.