Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) have the kind of meet-cute that hits with a bang, forgive the pun. A rising chef and a techie for Weetabix, respectively, they meet when she strikes him with her car. Unaware that the reason Tobias was in the road was running to get a pen to finally sign his divorce papers, Altmut buys him dinner at a kind of Americana diner cousin to the one where All of Us Strangers set its glorious heart-ripper of a climax and then invites him and his wife to dinner at her much ritzier restaurant–as a two-part act of penance.

He takes her up on the invitation. Solo. In short order, they get to connecting. Despite the guilt and the neck brace, they hit it off. There’s a spark, one they run with once it becomes clear that despite being unready to shed his wedding band, Tobias is single.

That’s how We Live in Time starts, but it’s not where it starts. No, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) opens years into Almut and Tobias’ partnership. Instead of meeting Almut committing an act of near vehicular homicide, the audience first encounters her blending pleasure (a morning run) and business (gathering wild ingredients for a parfait recipe she’s been experimenting with). Pugh makes a strong first impression. She’s someone who stops to smell the flowers both for joy and utility. More importantly, she’s found a balance between the two that brings happiness.

Crowley and DP Stuart Bentley (Black Mirror) follow Almut through her morning—winding down her run through a countryside that would make Tolkien swoon, chatting with her chickens while collecting eggs, crafting her parfait, and waking up Tobias to serve as her crash taste dummy. The opening serves to not only establish how Almut lives, but how she and Tobias have threaded their lives together. It’s one of many fine scenes in an ultimately frustrating movie. Think a pair of gorgeous shoes with their laces tied together.

Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne (The BBC/Netflix joint Wanderlust) lay out Almut and Tobias’ separate and shared stories. Then the duo scrambles them. After the idyllic opener, they hop back to that first meeting, then forward to Almut learning that her ovarian cancer has returned after years in remission. Across an hour and 48 minutes, We Live in Time follows Tobias and Almut as they fall in love, grapple with differing desires, navigate Almut’s first bout with cancer, have a daughter, and figure out how to move through the cancer’s aggressive return.

Pugh does very fine work as Almut. She carries a lot when times are good and continues to juggle that while facing the enormity of her illness. Garfield unfurls Tobias beyond his abiding sweetness, revealing a dedicated planner whose attention to detail can be both balm and albatross. Together, they craft a couple whose life is good without tripping into the saccharine. Their emotional and physical passion for each other is charming, if, sadly, never quite as sexy as they’re trying for. How their care for one another and their daughter Ella (Grace Delaney) clashes with their individual needs reads as genuine—particularly when placed under stress.

On paper, the couple’s story is compelling, the time-hopping an interesting conceit. After all, as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith teaches us in Magnolia, the past is never through with us. The lives we live repeatedly bring memories forward for remembrance, reconsideration, and reinterpretation. To face illness is to face health, to face death is to face life. To sample your partner’s prototype parfait is to sample a madeleine. That madeleine leads you back to a massive milkshake recommended by a hilariously grumpy waitress. Wondering how your daughter will remember you takes you back to the rest stop bathroom where you gave birth to her in the midst of a traffic jam with only the help of your partner and two above-and-beyond staffers.

But the remixed timeline’s execution trips up Pugh and Garfield’s work, and Crowley and company’s craft backing that chemistry. It’s a jumble with too many missing pieces. When Tobias confesses that he’s very close to falling in love with her during an early-in-the-relationship argument that grows fangs, it falls flat. Yes, we’ve seen that they will love each other, but the falling itself, slowly or otherwise, is nowhere to be seen. Major pieces of Tobias and Almut’s story that must have happened based on what We Live in Time does choose to show simply aren’t there.

The result is a patchwork that lacks vital connective tissue. For all the care taken with the specific beats We Love in Time chooses to show, the way it executes its time-hopping strips them of the collective impact the picture is trying for. As good as Pugh and Garfield are, and as striking as parts of We Live in Time are, something’s missing. It’s not hollow, but it doesn’t connect.

We Live In Time keeps on tripping, tripping, tripping into the future in theatres now.

We Live in Time Trailer: