Let’s say you’re lucky enough to find a soulmate the way that Larry (Miles Teller) and Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) did, all those decades ago. Once upon a time, she was a librarian. He needed a book. Joan was a widow, whose husband was a soldier; he died fighting for his country in Korea. Larry made her laugh. They married, had kids, and later, grandkids. The couple did what couples do: bantered, bickered, made a life together. Joan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Larry had a fatal encounter with a pretzel at a gender-reveal party. Til death do they part, etc.
Ok, back to this hypothetical scenario. What if, like Joan, you find yourself transitioning to the Great Beyond, which resembles a cross between a job fair and Grand Central Station at rush hour. This is the Junction, a sort of limbo where the recently deceased get to pick where they spend their happily-forever-afters. Maybe your version of heaven is an eternal stay of Paris in the 1960s. Maybe it’s 1930s Germany (“now with 100% less Nazis!”). Maybe it’s a perpetual tropical-beach getaway, or a mountain retreat that never ends, or simply a world without men — although that last one is, unsurprisingly, already way past capacity. In any case, you get one week to choose, then that’s it. That is where you will spend forever and ever, amen.
And what if, like Joan, you immediately saw your late, great partner, greeting you with all of the relief and affection a posthumous human being could muster. And then, out of nowhere, you also saw your version of Luke (Callum Turner), a.k.a. the original spouse who perished in combat. He’s as handsome and dashing as the day he shipped out. Rather than select a personalized heaven, Luke has been waiting 67 years for his Joanie to join him in the hereafter. He simply stuck around purgatory, working as a bartender, until she shuffled off this mortal coil.
So, you have your first true love, the one who was ripped away from you way too soon and with whom you never had the chance to experience domestic bliss with, ready to finally start an afterlife with you on one side. And then you’ve got the person you did spend your days on earth with, changing diapers and paying mortgages, who you have decades worth of shared history, on the other side. Here’s the $100,000 question: Who do you choose?
Welcome to Eternity, a romantic comedy that feels like it’s new but is, in fact, almost as old as time and the movies themselves. Because what we’ve got here is spiffed-up redo of your classic comedy of remarriage, that subgenre of Golden-Age-of-Hollywood screwball romps mixed with a good, old-fashioned afterlife fantasy. Think The Philadelphia Story meets Defending Your Life. Or maybe His Girl Friday on a blind date with Heaven Can Wait. Like the temporary residents of its way station between the living and the dead, the choice is yours in terms of fused cinematic comparisons.
Even the cast somehow feel like they’re surfing the throwback waves as well. We wouldn’t be the first to think of Robert Mitchum when we look at Miles Teller’s manly, around-the-block mug, even as he slips comfortably into a Ralph Bellamy state of mind when things get manic. Elizabeth Olsen does vintage flirty ‘n’ flighty with an impeccable sense of Jean Arthur timing, and a glamor-puss profile that would make Claudette Colbert envious. To say that Callum Turner is giving Joel McRea or Tyrone Power here would be putting it mildly. Even John Early and the great Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who play competing “afterlife counselors,” are simply putting their spin on the kind of comic-relief sidekick roles that Franklin Pangborn and Thelma Ritter made whole careers out of. The logo at the top of the movie says A24. The movie itself is way, way more TCM.
Leah Gallo/A24
Add in the fact that whole thing feels filtered through a late 1990s quirkfest vibe, complete with goofy visual gags — kudos to whoever dreamed up the afterlives ranging from never-ending medical-TV dramas to nudist camps — and a memory “archive” that feels a college theater production if designed by Michel Gondry while high on cold medicine, and you have an Eternity that’s juggling several different nostalgia waves. It all boils down that central question asked upfront, and while director David Freyne (The Cured, a zombie movie that also hinged on a high-concept “what-if?”) doesn’t add much to the proceedings, he does keep his eyes steadily on the prize.
Which is, naturally, the human element at play in this whimsical, self-aware take on the ol’ love-triange chestnut. It helps immensely that Teller and Olsen pair well with each other — she definitely brings out the best in a scene partner who can sometimes seem remote onscreen — and that Turner knows exactly how to make this “perfect” guy feel flawed yet still likable. And likability is a quality that Eternity actively courts. It wants to put audiences in Joan’s position and, like her, make them ask what really counts: the love that could have been, or the love that you know? You can tell it’s also striving to be the film equivalent of comfort food or an “Afterlive, Laugh, Love!” poster as well. Hard to ding something for wanting to be a cult rom-com so badly, especially when it’s so well-acted. But that sense of self-conscious cleverness and cutesy desperation is a choice that the movie is now going to have to live with forever.
