Flasz On Film

Synopsis: In an afterlife where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity, Joan is faced with the impossible choice between the man she spent her life with and her first love, who died young and has waited decades for her to arrive.

In a year punctuated with a small number of what-if fantasies with an uplifting or bittersweet bent, like The Life of Chuck and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, there’s clearly space for one more movie to come and give general audiences an opportunity to experience a well-balanced mixture of lighthearted comedy with a tiny bit of edge and sombre reflection on how we struggle to appreciate the lives we have and oftentimes wish to leave in pursuit of half-baked fantasies, all under the cozy blanket of an accessible love story. And this movie is Eternity.

Directed by David Freyne (Dating Amber, The Cured) and starring Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller, this movie launches us into the land of make-believe where after we die, we don’t go to heaven or hell, and nor do we simply decompose into nothingness, as if to satisfy the kind of doom and gloom Schopenhauer would feel at home with. Instead, we find ourselves in a fantasy deployment hub from which numerous trains depart, taking recently deceased souls into eternities of their choosing. And here we do follow a couple who, having grown old together, die and need to decide if they want to continue. But what if you don’t? What if your entire life, happy as it was, was marked by a loss of your first love? And what if that love could meet you at that Grand Soul Central of sorts, having patiently waited for you to die and to ask you to spend eternity together?

Eternity asks this fundamentally relatable question without ever drawing suspicions of pomposity or self-aggrandizement. This is not a piece heavy-handed drivel aimed at artsy crowds wishing for nothing more than an opportunity to wallow in elevated despair (which is totally fine by the way in some contexts), but rather a clever and light on its toes romantic dramedy that wants to serve as counterweight to the recent surge in anti-rom-coms like Regretting You or It Ends with Us with its feel-good appeal. At the same time, it separates itself from the pack of mostly disposable and narratively interchangeable rom-com slop you’d find in spades on a streaming service of your choosing (as long as the streaming service in question knows enough about your preferences to suggest them in the first place) and feels decidedly fresh and fun to spend time with.

This is in no small part owed to the combined chemistry of the film’s leads as Olsen and Teller competently capture the kind of chemistry people would share having spent their entire lives together (and we only see their characters in their “Millennial form” because in the movie your soul presents at the age when you were at your happiest), while Callum Turner, playing Olsen’s first husband who died in Korean War and waited patiently to join her in eternity, introduces sufficient electricity into this arrangement to give the movie the dramatic tension it needs.

However, the central love story that has numerous opportunities to slide towards schmaltzy sappiness is well contained and counterbalanced by its frequent jaunts into comedy. This way, what Eternity puts forward is a peaceful coexistence of a refreshing love story alongside its tongue-in-cheek world-building and crass-adjacent indulgences… that actually work because instead of undercutting the central romance or overpowering the narrative, they simply add a dash of zest to lighten it slightly with conceptual jokes orbiting the myriad prefab eternities we get to see, the inner workings of that supernatural waystation and a few instances of self-awareness coming from the main characters and the supporting cast of Afterlife Co-ordinators (Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early) who are here to deliver exposition and serve as comic relief catalysts. And it all… just… gels together.

Consequently, Eternity adds up to an accessible and fundamentally entertaining piece of storytelling that fulfills the definition of a canonical romantic comedy but—without necessarily subverting its template wholesale—it gives it a subtle makeover and an intellectual edge. In fact, a few scenes towards the end look and feel as though the filmmakers took a page or two out of Charlie Kaufman’s handbook for genre reinvention.

It’s an agile and tactile little movie that extends the tradition of love stories with a supernatural element and finds a way to get the viewer to have a good time interacting with the narrative, chuckle here and there and finally emerge primed for self-reflection. And this makes the experience worth the price of admission. It’s a difficult balancing act to juggle all these seemingly disparate missions without overdoing it one way or the other. But Eternity somehow manages to keep things light, stay true to the format, and remain authentic and earnest without coming off as preachy. It’s a movie that reassures its audiences that fantasies full of sparky and electric desire peddled in bog-standard romances pale in comparison with the kind of ordinary love we take for granted as we grow old together with our life partners. Which makes it a great date movie to go see.