Chapter 1: To See

A mini-series brought to you by Irina, honouring each of the five senses.

If “The Fault in Our Stars” had an older sibling, it would be the movie “We Live in Time”. The modern, heart-breaking creation released at the beginning of 2025 made a sensation across the public with its tragic theme, and it has attracted the public eye ever since its marketing campaign spread on TikTok last year. It stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, and while Director John Crowley (Brooklyn, The Goldfinch) managed to bring us into the relatable and touching world of the main characters through pure gut-wrenching sadness, my question is: why do we crave movies that will break our hearts?

One night many weeks ago, I decided to have a movie date with my partner, as we had not had a cinema date in a while. Cinema dates are great unless his favourite director is Tarantino and yours is an indie one whose name no one can even pronounce; then it becomes a problem. Luckily, my boyfriend and I are not that cool, so we can enjoy essentially any kind of movie. “We live in time” had been on my bucket list for a very long time, primarily after seeing all the TikToks of people coming out of the cinema claiming “it was the most heart-destroying experience of their life” and so forth. We went in, grabbed our popcorn, and clung to the experience from start to finish. We devoured it. Once the movie was finished, I quickly realised the embarrassment that the only person in the room crying was me. Great, then why did I go in the first place?

The movie follows the two main characters, Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), navigating the tumultuous and beautiful journey of a mundane relationship in London. They meet coincidentally, and their lives are turned around just as unexpectedly. Life takes a turn for the worse. The screening is relatable, painful, and (darkly) comedic. It has all the elements a contemporary tragedy should have, in one’s opinion. John Crowley (the director) manages to capture the main essence of the movie: the frailty of time. The symbols of clocks, timers, and even the storyline itself all remind us of how quickly, slowly, and aleatory time works. “Do you remember how to crack an egg?” becomes one of the saddest lines in the whole movie, as its simplicity reflects the beginning and end of time. They live in time. We live in time. The line itself means little and a lot. It signifies a completely random chunk of time in the window of someone’s life. “I would say the emotional ambition of the film was to find moments, epic moments, in a very relatable way. I think that when you step back from it, you think that divorce and falling in love, having a baby, and dealing with mortality are the stuff of people’s everyday, unromantic, unpoetic reality. It’s just the stuff of grown-up life,” says Crowley in an interview for The Au Review. The relatability of the movie attracts the audience, yet my initial question remains: why do we still want to watch movies that will tear our hearts open?

Perhaps it is the mere idea of them all or the fact that many iconic romance movies follow the well-established “rules” of a Shakespearean-esque tragedy. Movies such as The Notebook, Titanic, and even La La Land all have a similar purpose: to fill us with pathos and bring some tears to our eyes. The plot and storylines usually follow one of the many variables of this formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, cathartic point, something happens to the boy and girl. In Aristotelian times, and perhaps in a play like Hamlet, the boy or the girl ends up dying for a greater cause. Nowadays, the boy and girl usually end up separated by death to no means, or they find happiness someplace else. Regardless, this formula seems to have been efficient for centuries in creating pathos that will mark the audience. Why do we still watch them? Stephen King, a bestselling writer, tries to answer the question of “Why do we crave horror movies?” in a similar latitude. Apart from the fact that he calls us all “mentally ill” in his essay, which I cannot agree or disagree with, he makes some important points that could provide the answer to my question, too. He argues that we crave horror movies to “show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this rollercoaster”, which can be just as easily said about tragic, sad movies. We want to prove we can watch a movie that will break us into pieces and that we can withstand it. We will not break at the sight of a carefully crafted illusion by another talented human being whose sole purpose is to make us “break”. We want to prove to ourselves and others that we are something greater, stronger than human, whatever that may mean. We do not want to fall into the trap of “just a movie”, yet we make ourselves fall into the trap of “I am not weak like others. I am strong”. The illusion mirrors the illusion, and the human is only just a human.

“There is a feeling that I get, and I think everyone gets when you watch a film, and I call it Cinema. When you experience cinema, and you’re sort of in a room, and you’re watching, it does that thing to you, that kind of profound unnamable thing, that moves you and confirms you on this planet, in this life.” quotes Jacob Elordi, actor and performer in an interview panel at the Berlinale Film Festival. The best way I can answer my question, ‘Why do we watch movies that make us cry?’ is exactly what King and Elordi articulate in their ways: the relatability factor, the uncanny feeling one gets experiencing cinema and being drawn into a world such as “We Live in Time”. The realisation that you have felt that way before, that creeping sorrow, or maybe you are even feeling it now. There is beauty hidden in every corner, in every wall of life. Time moves, and it never moves for us. In the amalgam of it all, nobody makes it out alive. Maybe horror and tragedy have more in common than Stephen King even realised; maybe they are all there to remind us that “viața bate filmu” is a Romanian expression that essentially means “life conquers any movie”.