Film reviews: Cork-directed We Live in Time is a stunner
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in We Live In Time, directed by Cork's John Crowley.
★★★★★
There are few sights more glorious in modern cinema than Florence Pugh cutting loose, and (15A) affords her plenty of opportunity to flex.
Pugh plays Almut, who is a brilliant, driven chef when she meets Weetabix rep Tobias (Andrew Garfield), whose diffident, retiring personality is very much the yin to Almut’s brash and bolshy yang.
But opposites attract, as they generally do on the silver screen, even when one character has the temerity to knock down the other in a road accident.
Happily, Almut quickly hauls Tobias off to hospital and sticks around to hold his hand, whereupon they are quickly established as a young, attractive couple whose meeting of minds augurs well for their long-term future.
This much we learn in flashback, however; almost as soon as the film begins, Almut receives the horrendous news that she has ovarian cancer, with no guarantee that the proposed treatment will be successful.
John Crowley’s film, which is written by Nick Payne, is presented in a non-linear style, flashing back and forward through the timeline of the couple’s relationship to devastating emotional effect.
A hard-won compromise now is no guarantee of harmony in the following scene; the peaks and troughs of any healthy relationship tend to clash rather than rise and fall.
Through it all, though, Pugh and Garfield sustain a wonderfully organic chemistry, its effect heightened by Stuart Bentley’s regular and extended close-ups of both actors, which dramatically accentuate both the intensity of the scenes and the couple’s intimacy.
We’re not exactly rooted in gritty realism: Garfield’s thoughtful and gentle Tobias is a little too good to be true, and it’s unlikely that Almut’s failing health would allow her to compete in the gruelling Bocuse d’Or, aka ‘the culinary Olympics’.
That said, the story feels unusually authentic as the ostensibly mismatched pair navigate the large and small milestones of a relationship lived defiantly in the face of impending doom.
★★★★☆
Robert Eggers’s (16s) is remake of F.W. Murnau’s classic horror Nosferatu (1922), which was largely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The story opens in 1838, with newlywed estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travelling from Germany to the heart of the Carpathian Alps to formalise the purchase of Grünewald Manor by the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).
In taking on the commission offered by his employer Knock (Simon McBurney), Thomas pooh-poohs the fears of his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman prone to melancholy diagnosed as ‘hysterical spells’ by the diligent but condescending Dr Sievers (Ralph Ineson), and who is terrorised by dreams of death made manifest in the form of a predatorial beast she seems to previously encountered – literally or otherwise – in her childhood.
So far, so standard, but Eggers distracts us from the familiar with a dazzlingly beautiful opening half in which the gothic tropes are invested with a naturalism that grounds the supernatural elements and renders Thomas’s plight a genuinely chilling experience.
The count’s castle, for example, looms over its Carpathian valley like foreshadowing made stone; inside, however, all is decay, coarse fabrics and fractured paving, and a long cry from the kind of sybaritic luxury we’ve come to expect of the aristocratic undead.
Having swathed the story in the hyper-realism of a fever dream, however, Eggers then moves the story back to Germany, where Ellen’s ‘visions and night-wanderings’ are more literally explored in the wake of the count’s arrival.
It’s all suitably grotesque, but the recurring motifs of plague, blood, death and eroticism grow a little wearying in their repetition, especially when the disgraced Professor Franz (Willem Dafoe) wades into the fray with his frantic ravings.
Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp are both strong as the twin leads, and while we see very little of Bill Skarsgård beneath the prosthetic make-up, his hulking, rotting vampire is the very stuff of nightmares.
