For a film that strives as desperately as this one does to jazz up its soggy tearjerker of a story, John Crowley’s bittersweet romantic drama makes some thuddingly conventional choices. A terminal disease heart-tugger that leans heavily on the charisma and chemistry of stars Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, it adopts a (500) Days of Summer-style non-linear structure that injects a degree of playful experimentation into an otherwise fairly familiar story.

The romance between award-winning chef Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield), a divorcee with the soulful eyes of an abandoned puppy, is fractured into tiny mosaic pieces. Piecing together the tale is a sweetly satisfying experience, even if the structure also acts as a barrier, meaning that we don’t get to know the characters as thoroughly as we otherwise might. But We Live in Time is let down by the jarring product placement (take a bow, Weetabix and Jaffa Cakes) and by the aggressively anodyne score, which sounds like the kind of reassuring, hand-holding mulch that might be played in a dentist’s waiting room.

• In UK and Irish cinemas