Warning: This post contains spoilers for We Live in Time.
We Live in Time ends like it begins—with one crucial difference. Eggs just collected from the coop are being cracked into glass bowls on their way to becoming breakfast. Only this time, instead of a woman named Almut cooking for her sleeping partner Tobias, it’s Tobias cooking with their daughter, Ella. He teaches the young pupil how to crack the eggs on a flat surface just as Almut, a celebrated chef, taught him during an early date. Another key difference: an adorably scruffy dog stands at their feet. It’s a callback to a conversation the couple had, after learning that Almut’s ovarian cancer had recurred and was incurable, about how dogs can help children heal from loss.
It’s a poignant bookend that speaks to the ways we keep our loved ones with us even after they’re gone. Almut had been terrified that she’d be forgotten, or that her kid would think of her as nothing more than a dead mom. The scene telegraphs Tobias’ commitment to showing Ella that her mom had a life outside of their world.
But it’s the penultimate scene that begs further dissection. And it’s one that a lot of people might be about to dissect as We Live in Time begins to play in theaters on Oct. 11: Since the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the A24 weepie from Brooklyn director John Crowley has garnered mostly positive reviews. In a cinematic landscape that has seen movies aimed largely at female audiences racking up box-office wins, and with a beloved and respected leading duo in Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, it’s clear that the appetite for a tear-jerking romance has hardly waned in the half century since Ryan O’Neal held Ali MacGraw on her deathbed in Love Story.
Read more: We Live in Time Asks Too Much of Us
But unlike that iconic film, We Live in Time does not take us to Almut’s death bed. It handles her death metaphorically, clearly alluding to it while…
