How We Live in Time gets cancer right

The day I found out my mum had breast cancer, my uncle picked me up from school. Mum had an appointment to get her scan results that afternoon, so this alone wasn’t enough to raise alarm bells.

My aunt, deemed close enough to be supportive while simultaneously one step removed to be able to absorb the medical jargon thrown her way (she was also a vet), offered to go with her. My uncle, meanwhile, was assigned the school run.

When we pulled up to the house to find them also just arriving, I naively asked from out of the car window how everything had gone. My 13-year-old self expected everything to be fine, for life to continue as normal and for this interlude to now be over.

As the pair of them stepped out of their car, my mum’s face told a different story. My uncle caught the same look, restarted his engine and made an excuse about how he’d forgotten to pick something up on his way back. We sat in painful silence the entire ride to the shop and back.

In hindsight, I often wonder who that extra 15 minutes the trip created was for: him, my step-dad waiting inside or for me.

In the kitchen, plans were drawn up for how to tell loved ones and battle the diagnosis that was set to unearth our lives. A chair was pulled out for me – it was time to take a seat at the adult’s table.

This kind of family upheaval in the face of a devastating diagnosis is beautifully captured in John Crowley’s We Live in Time. In somewhat Richard-Curtis-esque fashion, Almut (Florence Pugh), a chef and soon-to-be restaurant owner, and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a marketing executive for Weetabix, meet when she runs him over with his car while he’s in nothing but a dressing gown on a late-night trip to the shops, clearly discombobulated by his divorce paperwork.

As their love story develops, they tackle the expectations of first dates, introducing families and the question of children. Then comes the unexpected and unwanted when Almut is diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Later, when Almut and Tobias break the news of her disease’s recurrence to their five-year-old daughter, Ella, in a pizza restaurant, an old memory of mine resurfaces. “Mummy and I have something to tell you,” Garfield starts before Pugh adds, pulling a frown, “it’s just a bit serious”.

Unsurprisingly, her innocence allows her to release a giggle and slowly return to her colouring once her parents finish talking. My mind went to my brother, who was Ella’s age at the time of our mum’s diagnosis.

A few days before mum’s mastectomy, I was overthinking – or rather overtalking – in the car, asking her what felt like hundreds of questions a minute. Eventually, my five-year-old brother had had enough.

“Look,” a voice boomed from the back of the car, “it’s as simple as this. One side will be bumpy and one side will be flat,” and with that, he returned to this thumb-sucking silence. It was the longest either of us had laughed in a while.

As its title suggests, the film is more about time than the disease. We Live In Time’s plot isn’t linear, but rather skips from pre-diagnosis, during treatment and then, reoccurrence and the decision is genius. When faced with my mum’s diagnosis, time as a concept shifted in meaning and the calendar that used to run our lives became redundant.

Throughout my mum’s diagnosis and recovery, time shaped most of our conversations. During the summer and autumn of 2011, she underwent chemotherapy and we found ourselves orbiting around a three-week cycle.

The first week was the treatment and its aftermath, the second was the recovery and only in the third week did she slowly begin to feel like herself again. Those weeks were always our favourite – except, of course, for Sunday nights when we all knew what awaited on Monday mornings.

Later, one surgeon told us that mum’s tumour had been growing, slowly, for 18 months. It’s a piece of information we have constantly found ourselves returning to.

What exactly were we all doing 18 months ago? What did that day look like? Even if we could remember, would it have been a comfort?

Cancer tropes can fall into one of two traps. Stories, such as Chris Columbus’s Stepmom or the 2009 adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, are either told through rose-tinted glasses, desperate to offer a well-meaning and inspirational message. Or, in an attempt to shake off this stereotype, writers go the other way; patients are written as angry at the world and willing to take down anyone who offers to ease their frustrations with them, such as Showtime’s The Big C or Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already.

Growing up, I desperately wanted these plots to offer some answers to the questions circling my head but more often than not, they couldn’t. Rarely was there a happy medium between the fantastical and the overly candid. Until now.

We Live in Time makes the unthinkable not only bearable but wonderfully realistic. After they have told Ella about Almut’s diagnosis, Tobias, after previously discussing whether they should get a pet to teach her the circle of life, jokes that he’s glad they didn’t have to kill a dog unnecessarily.

In a blazing row over Almut’s reluctance to slow down her work while undergoing treatment, she screams through tears that she doesn’t want to be “somebody’s dead fucking mum”. Her guttural anger cast my mind back to a time when I loudly and publicly admonished a man in a supermarket car park for questioning why my mum was permitted to have a disabled parking space.

My mum is now in remission, but occasionally that messy hybrid of humour and frustration lives on in our family home. Whenever she suddenly grunts, struck with intense nerve pain (a side effect from the pregabalin she’s now prescribed), one of us shouts: “15-love!”. Even on the days when it makes it to match point, you can hear my mum’s stifled giggles.

The real beauty of We Live in Time lies in the fact that it’s not about cancer at all. It’s a story of how life is messy, gut-wrenching and heart-warming simultaneously – with or without the cancer.