This review is based on a screening which took place at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Eternity will be released theatrically in the United States this November.
Bureaucracy typically isn’t the first thing one thinks of when considering life after death, but it’s the first thing you encounter in the afterlife seen in Eternity, the latest film from A24 and The Cured director David Freyne. Presented as a cross between a train station and a show floor, fresh arrivals are reverted back to the appearance they had when they were most happy and given one week (and one week only, unless they take a job at the train station) to look at all the booths advertising different “eternities,” slices of afterlife where they will stay forever. Each one has a specific flavor ranging from relatively normal ones like “Mountain World” or “Beach World” to the patently absurd, such as “Ice Cream World” or “Smoking World” (since cancer can’t kill you twice!). And there’s no switching either, lest the guards hunt you down and send you back to the one you picked, kicking and screaming.
It’s an unorthodox take on the afterlife to say the least, but it provides an ample backdrop for a story about a recently deceased woman who finds herself forced to choose between a happily-ever-after with the man she spent her life married to or her first husband, who was KIA in the Korean War and has waited 67 years bartending at the station hoping to see her again. The woman is Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), and the movie does a great job illustrating not just the differences between her comfortable but neurotic long-term husband Larry (Miles Teller) and her dreamy but over-idealized lost lenore Luke (Callum Turner), but also the idea that Joan simply does not have the time or space to make an informed decision about anything considering how many outrageous demands are being placed on her at once. It’s a classic dilemma given fresh life by the unique scenario.
It’s also a movie that manages to wield its disparate tones to strengthen the work as a whole. Similar to the style of idiosyncratic auteurs like M. Night Shyamalan or Guillermo del Toro, Freyne’s Eternity understands that leaning into the film’s inherent weirdness and off-beat humor early on can help sell the emotional resonance of the film’s later acts. Because make no mistake, this movie can’t be easily categorized as a straightforward romantic comedy or romantic drama since it’s too eccentric for the former and too hilarious for the latter. But aside from a small handful of ill-timed gags, the humor generally doesn’t undercut the story’s dramatic aspects, with many scenes dedicated to getting the audience invested in these three characters and their understandable if irreconcilable viewpoints on the situation.
The film offers strong performances from the main trio, of which Olsen is the clear stand-out. Pretty much always the best part of whatever she’s in, Olsen’s frenzied manner and expert delivery (the slight bounciness in Joan’s voice often makes her seem like she’s one degree off of a nervous breakdown as she desperately tries to come off as rational) contrasts perfectly with the picturesque presentation of the look the afterlife selected as her happiest self. Her boys aren’t slouches either, with Teller and Turner deftly embodying opposing but complementary takes on masculine frustration which eventually morph into an unexpected bond built on their shared fear that Joan may not want to love them anymore now that she knows what’s on the other side of the horizon.
No points for guessing that there are further secrets and revelations about both of Joan’s relationships that add more strife to the story, yet if there are familiar beats in the structure, it’s to provide a fixed point of reference among the oddball nature of the rest of the proceedings. We are, after all, here to observe the choices and tribulations of human beings, and what makes such drama satisfying is the universality of the character’s experiences. Most of us can relate to falling in love but being uncertain of its future, even if most of us can’t relate to being dead and not sure what to do next. Freyne’s strong direction and smart screenplay, co-written by Pat Cunnane, ensure that Eternity never gets lost in its quirkiness, letting the audience marinate in the world’s outlandish qualities by tethering them to Joan’s emotional journey.
That said, the outlandish qualities do bring us to Eternity’s biggest drawback, which happens to be the world-building, ironically enough. Eternity makes great use of its specific version of the afterlife for supporting its main plot and providing many well-earned laughs, but there is a flippancy towards the more worrisome and contradictory elements of the setting. The afterlife being so strict about its collection of rules makes me wonder why there are so many in the first place. Why are people not allowed to switch eternities after selection, to the point that they’re threatened with being cast into “the void,” an eternity of black nothingness, if they repeatedly try to escape? And why are some worlds that should theoretically overlap depicted as separate places? Besides the aforementioned “Beach World,” there are also references to “Surf World” and “Yacht World.” Wouldn’t all three of these be the same place? Does Surf World not have a shoreline?
None of this is enough to sink the movie, because the focus is on the core drama between its three lead characters, but the best version of Eternity would have confronted these more nightmarish and arbitrary aspects of its world-building and made them part of the resolution. But that’s a relatively minor complaint when the core drama is so strong that I spent the entire third act with tears (happy, sad, and complicated tears!) welling in my eyes.
