There have been some excellent movies made about the afterlife: Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life, Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait are just a few that come to mind. Eternity doesn’t rank among them, though director David Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane deserve some credit for setting their sights so high. They have built an entire vision of the afterlife to serve as the setting for their otherwise modest romantic comedy. Okay, some credit … and maybe also some blame. The beyond that they’ve conjured up is so ridiculously specific that we can’t help but start poking holes in it.
Eternity is set in an afterlife where the newly dead must choose how they’d like to spend the rest of time. The deceased arrive in a huge, busy heavenly train station and are assigned ACs (afterlife coordinators) who will help them choose their eternal fate. This so-called Junction is something like a giant convention hall, with alternate worlds being advertised in booths and on walls. There’s Nudist World, Mountain World, Studio 54 World, Smoker’s World (because cigarettes can’t kill you twice), and Man-Free World (now at full occupancy), among many others. (One of the pleasures of the film is clocking all the many diverse futures on display.) When Larry Cutler (Miles Teller) arrives, he’s hesitant to pick a fate. Though he’s preceded his beloved wife, Joan, in death, she was also terminally ill, and he doesn’t think she’ll be too long in coming; you’re allowed to bring your loved one along to whichever world you choose, but neither you nor they can go back and change a decision once it’s been made. If that sounds unnecessarily restrictive for an infinite future of supposed bliss, well, take it up with the screenwriters.
Sure enough, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives soon, but there’s one hitch: Eternity’s bartender, Luke (Callum Turner), turns out to be Joan’s long-lost first husband, who had died in the Korean War before she and Larry wound up together, and he’s been waiting for her all these years in this place beyond all places. And Joan secretly still carries a torch for him. Who will she choose? The husband she already spent a life with or the one she lost long ago, and who has spent decades patiently awaiting her in the choir invisible? (In case it’s not clear, when you die in Eternity, you are incarnated at the age at which you were happiest. This will surely prompt further narrative-logic questions; again, don’t ask me.)
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Eternity wants to be a simple film, but thanks to its premise it can’t help but be a really convoluted one. Joan’s dilemma isn’t defined so much by her needs and desires as by the ridiculous rules of this totally made-up afterlife, where all these different options eventually start to feel more suffocating than satisfying or liberating; this is a movie about the wonders of monogamy that inadvertently makes monogamy sound like abject torture. That might have been a fun premise had it been in any way intentional. But it feels like a lot of time was spent thinking about the details of Eternity’s universe and very little was spent on its actual design and purpose. Or its actual look: We are told at various points that this land beyond the veil is not “heaven,” but that should not be an excuse for it to look so drab and, ahem, lifeless. One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane.
Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle — even though the film’s positing Miles Teller as the dorky beta to Callum Turner’s hunky alpha is somewhat undone by the fact that the two actors don’t look all that different from each other. Even so, Teller’s chatty anxiousness does contrast well with Turner’s smoldering, confident melancholy. And John Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as our heroes’ ACs, are clearly having a lot of fun. Most significantly, Olsen adds compelling layers of tenderness to Joan’s ongoing uncertainty: She genuinely doesn’t know which man to go with, and we believe it. By the time she’s forced into making her tearful final choice, it’s hard not to be moved by the actress’s conviction. She feels the part. If only the movie itself were as dedicated as she is.
