Eternity (2025)

Death, we are told, is the great simplifier. Except when it isn’t. David Freyne’s afterlife romantic comedy asks what happens when dying doesn’t resolve your relationship complications but merely relocates them to a celestial waiting room with better décor.

Elizabeth Olsen plays Joan, who finds herself in the “Junction” after shuffling off her mortal coil. Think of it as purgatory redesigned by a convention centre committee. The recently deceased get one week to choose their eternal destination from a bewildering array of themed worlds. Wine World. Outdoor World. Something called Man-free World, which the film wisely leaves unexplored. But Joan faces a complication the brochures didn’t mention: two husbands are waiting for her. Larry (Miles Teller) spent decades as her partner in the ordinary heroism of long marriage. Luke (Callum Turner), her first love, died in the Korean War and has been waiting sixty-seven years for her return. Sixty-seven years. One imagines the Junction’s entertainment options must be fairly limited.

The world-building here is genuinely inventive. Fake sunrises and sunsets mark time in a place where time has stopped mattering. Afterlife coordinators staff information booths with the weary patience of public servants everywhere. There’s an institution called the Archives where you can revisit any moment from your life, which sounds lovely until you consider the implications. Freyne and co-writer Pat Cunnane have clearly enjoyed constructing this spiritual bureaucracy, and their delight proves contagious.

Olsen does something quite difficult here. She has to play an eighty-year-old consciousness inhabiting a younger body, and she pulls it off. The weariness, the accumulated weight of choices made and unmade, all present beneath the surface. In my view, it’s the film’s strongest element. Teller, meanwhile, gives Larry a specific kind of anxiety: the fear of being the sensible choice rather than the passionate one. When measured against eternity, does dependability count for less than romance? It’s a question the film takes seriously.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early turn up as afterlife guides, and thank goodness for them. Their comic timing keeps things buoyant when the emotional logistics threaten to become exhausting. Randolph in particular has a knack for making bureaucratic absurdity feel almost comforting.

Where does it falter? The middle section, I think. The film runs nearly two hours, and somewhere around the halfway point it starts circling familiar emotional territory without digging deeper. Joan agonises. Larry worries. Luke waits some more, as he’s been doing for decades. We get it. Move along. There are also some missed opportunities with Joan’s more difficult memories. The film gestures toward complexity, then retreats to safer ground. A shame.

Still, the central question has teeth. What do we actually value when forced to choose? Joan eventually discovers that the small accumulated moments of daily life, all those unremarkable Tuesdays, can outweigh the white heat of young romance. It’s not a revolutionary insight, but the film earns it. Mostly.

Eternity doesn’t entirely escape romantic comedy conventions. The ending lands roughly where you expect, give or take a few detours. But it asks you to sit with something uncomfortable: that death won’t necessarily sort out our messes for us. Sometimes the choosing never ends.

Not a bad way to spend two hours. Even if eternity sounds rather more complicated than the afterlife tourism board would have you believe.