Weetabix representative Tobias Durand, while out purchasing a pen to sign divorce papers served to him by his wife, wanders into the road and is struck by a car driven by Almut Brühl, a former figure skater turned Bavarian-fusion chef.

Though Tobias intends to respect whatever Almut decides, she chooses to undergo a partial hysterectomy, leaving her with the possibility for natural born children in the future.

On New Year's Eve, she gives birth to a baby girl in a petrol station bathroom after her and Tobias' car gets stuck in a traffic jam on their way to the hospital.

Around three years later, Almut, now the head chef of her own higher-scale restaurant and having moved with her family to a small cottage and farm, begins feeling pains in her waist again.

While with the doctor, Almut and Tobias learn that her cancer has returned to stage 3, and that she would need to begin chemotherapy as soon as possible before any tumour removal surgery can be done, though there is still no guarantee of survival.

Towards the competition's end, Almut becomes weaker, beginning to falter during the plating of the last dish, letting Jade take control, and they successfully finish in time.

[14] StudioCanal handled worldwide sales and will distribute directly in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, the Benelux, Australia and New Zealand.

[15] A first look image of the film displaying the leads sharing a "cute scene" became an internet meme due to the presence of an "ugly carousel horse" in frame.

The website's consensus reads: "Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh's palpable chemistry will snatch audiences' hearts before breaking them in We Live in Time, a powerful melodrama that uses its nonlinear structure to thoughtfully explore grief.

"[31] In her review for The New York Times, Manolha Dargis praised the character of Almut, and Pugh's performance but found the film only "trie[d] to be modern".

Club, called the film "unimaginative and weirdly regressive," and opined that Garfield and Pugh, while "likable and sweet" were also "thin" and "boring", and were not convincing in their depiction of their characters' relationship.

On the nonlinear narrative, Tallerico thought that while appearing to be random at first glance, it exhibited "an emotional logic" upon a closer examination, in a way that evoked the way a person may remember key moments in their life as it comes to an end.

Tallerico was uncertain if there were not too many time jumps, commenting, "The chronological jumble will be a dealbreaker for some people who like their weepers straightforward", but speculated that the challenge in making this structure work is what attracted the actors to the project in the first place.

[34] Reviewing the film for Variety, Peter Debrugge thought the sequences in which the scenes were laid out was arbitrary, and in a way that made mapping out nonlinear narrative difficult.

While Whipp praised Pugh and Garfield, he felt that the film's execution of the non-linear structure distanced the audience from the two performers, rendering Almut and Tobias as concepts rather than characters.