I told myself that I wouldn’t say that “Eternity” is too long, but isn’t it always? If not the premise, that is at least the guiding principle behind David Freyne’s sincere, somewhat amusing, and sweetly overextended rom-com, which splits the difference between “After Life” and “Defending Your Life” with its story of a newly deceased woman named Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) being forced to choose which of her two husbands — the smoldering Luke who died in the Korean War (Callum Turner), or the absolute Larry she was married to for the 67 years that followed (Miles Teller) — she’d like to join forever in the great beyond.
Each of the fellas has their upsides (Luke is hot, and Larry is comfortable), but committing to either of them until the end of time seems like a pretty bleak proposal. Likewise, none of the gimmicky themed realms that Joan is offered to “live in” — Capitalist World, Studio 54 World, Weimar World, (“Now with 100% less Nazis!”) — feel like the kind of place you’d want to spend more than a few hours, let alone several billion years. “‘Til death do us part” is romantic, practical, and offset by the backdoor insurance policy of divorce. “‘Til the sun explodes, and then maybe even longer after that” is an ungodly prison sentence. Freyne’s hyper-agnostic film may not believe in heaven or hell, but it has some pretty vivid ideas of what the latter could look like.
A more ambitious — and less conservative — movie might have used this premise to dig a bit deeper into the commitments that people make to each other on this mortal coil, but “Eternity” is content to circle the idea that life is beautiful and worth treasuring because it doesn’t last forever. That much is clear from the moment Freyne and Pat Cunnane’s high-concept script (a real Black List special) first drops us into the Hyatt-like Junction where souls process what’s happened and have seven days to pick their final destinations from a variety of convention floor displays. The options range from bleak to bleaker, as everything about the set-up exudes all the romance and splendor of shopping for a time share. It’s enough to make us yearn for the gender reveal party where Larry choked to death on a pretzel; at least that came with the promise of an ending.
But the film’s characters are too caught up in their post-mortem love triangle to realize they’re essentially fighting over what meal Joan should choose to eat every single day of her infinite afterlife: her favorite comfort food, or a rare delicacy she’s been fantasizing about ever since her last taste of it in 1953. Larry is the first dead person we follow into the Junction, and like everyone else his physical form reverts to reflect how it looked when he was at his happiest, which for him was in his mid-30s after he first got married. Cute. The kind of nondescript everyman who loved to complain even though he walked through life without much want or trouble, Larry feels like a guy you’d meet in the buffet line on a cruise ship. He’s as nice as he is nondescript, and the jaded but personable Afterlife Coordinator assigned to his case (Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Anna) can’t wait to meet and forget her next client.
That changes, and how, when Anna realizes that the Junction’s handsome local bartender is Joan’s first love, and that Joan is the reason he took a service job in purgatory rather than choose a permanent vacation in paradise; Luke has been pouring beer and scrubbing glasses for more than half a century in the hopes that he and Joan might be reunited when she dies. Which, conveniently enough, she does just a few moments before Larry is meant to board a train for the godforsaken eternity he’s chosen for himself (Beach World). Suddenly, and to the great delight of both Anna and her fellow AC, Ryan (John Early), there’s some real juicy drama in the Junction. Which man will Joan choose, Captain America or the guy whose farts she’s had to smell for the last six decades? Like a metaphysical riff on Netflix’s “The Ultimatum,” she’ll get a trial run with both of them before having to make up her mind.
“Eternity” does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it. While the movie’s three-sided romance is never quite as artificial as the Junction where so much of it takes place, its angles lose their sharpness over the course of a story that has so much scenery to attend to, and each of its main characters is left to fight an uphill battle against the archetype that threatens to define them.
The cast is game for the challenge (and fun to watch do the “old people in A24-era bodies” thing), even if their best efforts aren’t quite enough to give “Eternity” the emotional undertow it needs to become more than a semi-charming thought exercise. Teller’s upbeat, go-with-the-flow charm makes him easy to accept as a simple guy who just wants — and expects — his afterlife to resemble the one he left on Earth, and the fact that he’s more of a leading man than a characer actor lends an extra zing to the constant jokes about how much hotter Callum Turner is, like any of us could hope to compete with the future Mr. Lipa (someone in the movie compares Luke to Montgomery Clift, and Turner channels that matinee idol energy to a tee).
Olsen, meanwhile, has the most thankless and important role in the story, but her mid-century war bride routine is charming enough to make the whole thing feel effortless, and the interiority she rescues from the script only makes it more convincing that two good-looking men would fight each other to — or is it from? — the death to be with her forever. While Joan flip-flops about her feelings more often than John Kerry on the campaign trail (a painfully outdated reference that’s still a few decades too recent for Larry to use or Luke to understand), her anguish is palpable enough to anchor the movie to something real as it runs between different fantasy worlds. For their part, Early and Randolph both feel held down in a less fortunate way; much as this gifted pair compensates for the comedy that “Eternity” can’t wring out of its leads (and have solid chemistry to boot), you can almost feel them being smothered by the schematic nature of a story that doesn’t have room for them to cut loose.
It’s a story that’s better told by its setting than with its action — one that doesn’t really go anywhere, and still takes the scenic route to get there. In that light, Zazu Myers’ production design probably deserves top billing here. We don’t get to see enough of the Junction to disabuse us of the sense that it’s a glorified Broadway backdrop (complete with painted skylines and cloth scrims to indicate whether it’s day or night), but the well-observed tackiness of its mid-century aesthetic, and the related impression that purgatory didn’t exist until Don Draper invented it as an advertising opportunity, helps underscore the idea that life in any realm is only as tolerable as the people with whom you choose to spend it.
“Eternity,” however doesn’t have any interest in that kind of cynicism, to the point that it forgoes the most logical ending — a shared embrace of the void — for a different kind of forever. In doing so, it somewhat forfeits the film’s prevailing message — that life is beautiful as a result of its brevity and occasional bitterness — in favor of a more digestible morale about the paradises we create for ourselves here on Earth. It’s a fitting compromise for such a pleasantly unobjectionable rom-com; one that’s scared of forever, but takes almost just as long just to end up back where it started.
Grade: C+
“Eternity” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. A24 will release the film in select theaters on November 14 before expanding on November 26.
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