Every generation gets the cancer romance it deserves. In We Live in Time, terminal illness gives an extra sense of urgency to an echt-millennial story about the push-pull of professional ambition and family obligation – the desire to make the most of the time you have. Almut (Florence Pugh) is a chef who starts the film by whipping up a “Douglas fir parfait” and ends it tweezing microgreens onto a deconstructed seafood tower; in between, she earns a Michelin star for her “modern European takes on classic alpine dishes.”

She and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) meet cute when she Meet Joe Blacks him with her car as he wanders out into traffic to pick up a piece of chocolate orange; she’s a magnetic chef on the rise and he’s a newly-divorced sadsack, and it’s difficult to see what she sees in him aside from a screenwriterly contrivance. She feeds him well, he eats it up; she offers excitement and pleasure, and he keeps her regular (he works for Weetabix), donning readers and assiduously taking notes at all her doctor’s appointments.

The film unfolds over three timelines, delineated by Almut’s three distinct hairstyles. Across their courtship, they argue over whether they should continue their relationship given their asymmetric feelings about having children – he wants them, but she’s not sure, until her first ovarian cancer diagnosis scares her into fertility; the twee score by Bryce Dessner of The National swells when the pregnancy test finally returns a positive result. On the day their daughter is born, director John Crowley pushes epic set-pieces: pulling the Mini out of a tight parking space to drive to the hospital; Tobias feeding Almut jaffa cakes in the bath between contractions; and an epic birth in a petrol station loo, with Pugh on all fours, screaming and sweating in a suitably virtuoso performance – onscreen and off, Pugh navigates her fame with a constant aura of Main Character Energy, which fits the driven Almut and gives the film an appealingly substantial melodramatic scope.

Ticking clocks are the major motif here: a thirtysomething career woman’s biological clock and the minutes between contractions; the kitchen timers counting down the minutes to service, and seconds left in the competition to which Almut stakes her legacy; the life expectancy of a cancer patient no longer responding to chemo, and how many more achievements, or memories, she can hope to pack in.

The time-hopping chronology is an elaborate structural conceit in conversation with the film’s theme, but it feels rather manipulative – a way for the narrative to withhold reveals and build to three climaxes, and to hopscotch from highlight to highlight whenever things threaten to become too prosaic.

Both actors are the wrong age for their characters but both are outside aging in a moisturised movie-star kind of way, so the film seems to just float between highlights like a Greatest Hits album with a chronological track listing. This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.