Eternity (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts:

1. The cast is pitch-perfect.
2. It has the feel of an old-school rom-com, which is nice. Director David Freyne was inspired by The Apartment (1960), Heaven Can Wait  and Sullivan’s Travels
3. The high-concept idea is stretched a bit thin, but I appreciate the world-building
4. Miles Teller is perfect as a big oaf of a guy
5. Elizabeth Olsen has a lot to do, and she does it effortlessly. 

It makes a lot of sense that the screenplay for Eternity landed on the Blacklist because it’s simultaneously high concept and unwieldy. On the surface, the idea of a deceased woman named Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) having to choose which of her deceased husbands (Miles Teller, Callum Turner) to spend eternity with is perfectly straightforward for a rom-com. However, toss in world-building, a love triangle, additional characters, rom-com tropes, and a “bureaucratic Brutalist hub that encased a chaotic tourism expo of eternities,” (thank you press notes) and you have a lot of story to cover. The good news is that Eternity is a refreshingly nice film that features solid work from Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

The story opens with an elderly man (who is supremely cranky) named Larry Cutler (Teller) choking on a pretzel during a gender reveal party thrown by his daughter. After dying, he wakes up on a train and is delivered to an afterlife waystation where his afterlife coordinator Anna (Joy Da’Vine Randolph) tells him he has seven days to choose where he’ll spend eternity. When he died, Larry was in his 80s, but in the afterlife he’s in his mid-30s, which was when he was the happiest during his life as he and his wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) had just welcomed their second child into the world. While there, he meets Luke (Callum Turner), a handsome bartender, who after dying in the Korean War, has been waiting in the waystation for 67 years so he can be reunited with his wife. The problem is that both men were married to Joan, and when she passes away several days after Larry dies, she arrives in the afterlife with both of her husbands expecting she will spend eternity with them. Does she pick her handsome first husband whom she was married to briefly and loved passionately? Or, will she pick Larry, an oaf of a guy, who after 65 years of marriage knows how to make her comfortable and happy (there’s a great bit that involves squats)? It’s a perfect setup for a rom-com because it’s absurd and allows for miscommunications, love triangles, dancing scenes, and third-act running scenes that always appear in rom-coms (think When Harry Met Sally, Jerry Maguire, The Graduate, Love Actually, and Licorice Pizza). 

An inspired idea from writers Patrick Cunnane and David Freyne was to make the afterlife waystation look like it’s inside the atrium of a large hotel (or casino) that’s filled with stuffy rooms, a convention center (filled with thousands of afterlife options), and a train station used to deliver the deceased to their afterlives. The production design by Zazu Myers (My Old Ass – wonderful movie) is inspired as the low-budget film leans into artifice by using large curtains to symbolize day and night. If you’ve ever been stuffed into a stuffy hotel room or convention hall, you’ll know how claustrophobic things can seem, so it makes sense that the waystation to the afterlife isn’t comfortable or welcoming. The goal of the in-between area is for newly deceased people to pick where they want to spend eternity. They can pick from thousands of eternities (Beach World, Capitalist World and Man Free World are some examples), and can never leave the one they pick – if they do, they’ll be tossed into a dark void where they’ll float in darkness for eternity. Making the purgatory-esque waystation worse is that drinking still leads to hangovers, and the afterlife coordinators don’t really care about the potential happiness of their clients because they’re too busy filling afterlife quotas.

At press screenings, you’re asked to share your thoughts with a representative when leaving the theater. I must’ve used the word “nice” about 20 times and I consider that to be a compliment. If you dig deeper into the world of Eternity, it could become a horror film, but knowing that it takes place in a rom-com world and stars a trio of excellent performers makes the experience supremely pleasant. Elizabeth Olsen has a lot to do, and she does it effortlessly, and you completely understand why the characters played by Miles Teller and Callum Turner love her. Of the three actors, Turner gets the least to do as the majority of the dialogue revolves around his resemblance to Montgomery Clift (dude is handsome). The MVP of the film is Miles Teller, who has an everyman charm that makes him a far-from-perfect oaf who just really loves his wife (despite complaining all the time).

Final Thoughts – It’s a nice film. Watch it.