Eternity (2025) is directed and written by David Freyne and Patrick Cuanne Strong.
The cast includes renowned names like Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner and Miles Teller.
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.
David Freyne’s Eternity (2025) is a drop in the ocean amongst many “who will she choose?” romantic comedies released in recent times. In the afterlife, “eternity” is a train ride away and recently departed souls have one week to decide where they want to spend theirs. The film quite essentially asks: ““Till death do us part”, sure—but what if death were no longer the boundary? Who would you choose to spend eternity with?”
Freyne and Patrick Cunnane Strong design a transit space between death and eternity that feels paradoxically compressed, defined by the kind of regulations one would assume no longer apply beyond human life. The lobby spills into an endlessly active convention hall marketed with the zeal of a tourism fair. Pick your eternity, whether it is “queer world”, “beach world”, “Paris world”, “man-free world”, “1930s Germany (with 100% no Nazis) or “smoking world” (since cancer can’t kill you twice!)” out of many. The station-hotel-convention hall hybrid is a simulated, Brutalist-style, self-contained set recalling The Truman Show (1998). Placing love and existentialism at the forefront, the film situates an entirely plausible human dilemma within a deliberately imagined world.
Heteronormative love stories usually stick to one of two outcomes—happily ever after or tragic loss. Eternity sidesteps that formula, showing that love can be messy, defined in multiple ways and even contradictory, but still irresistible. The film positions Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) in a rock and a hard place between her first husband Luke (Callum Turner) and second husband Larry (Miles Teller)—deciding which man will accompany her through the rest of the afterlife. Reminiscent of Netflix show The Ultimatum (2022), Joan is granted an unconventional trial, spending a day in both eternities with Larry and Luke before committing to a choice. Not long ago, another A24 film Materialists (2025) posed a similar premise: A woman torn between her one-that-got-away and her pitch perfect match on paper. Celine Song’s film glossed over the many facets of a romance that selectively idealises the good parts of a past love (that did not work out) and thrives on the very privileged idea that relationships exist in a void, away from capitalistic influences. Song has also explored a love triangle in her previous film Past Lives (2023), which is a far superiorly conceptualised film and would be aptly comparable to Eternity. It also recalls Albert Brooks’ 1991 dramedy, Defending Your Life with the premise of the afterlife.
Love triangles work when characters are messy, magnetic, and memorable, forcing the audience to choose between real chemistry, not just two “perfect” options standing side by side politely. After Larry dies following their sixty-seven years together, Joan enters the afterlife, only to discover that Luke, her first husband and a soldier lost to war, has spent all those years as a bartender at the station, preparing for the moment he can reclaim the future they once imagined. Reincarnated into the age of their lives when happiness felt most tangible, the three characters navigate a spirited interplay defined by wit, tension, and sharply drawn, multifaceted personalities. Teller and Turner navigate the tension between envy and admiration with subtle dexterity—Luke envying Larry’s decades-long companionship with Joan, while Larry remains unsettled by Luke’s position as her idealised first love. Each protagonist struggles against the archetypes hovering over them, fighting to assert individuality against a story that constantly reminds them who they’re “supposed” to be. The screenplay acknowledges this tension without reducing Luke to an antagonist or Larry to a foil. Sympathy extends to both men, yet it ultimately aligns with Joan.
Freyne’s assured direction, paired with a sharp screenplay co-written by Cunnane, ensures that the narrative never loses itself in its own eccentricity. Yet these very eccentricities highlight the film’s most ironic limitation: its world-building. The film may shrug at the idea of heaven and hell, yet it conjures a strikingly concrete sense of what the latter might entail: being cast into a “void” of blackness for disobeying any rules. However, audiences are allowed to inhabit the afterlife’s absurdities without losing sight of Joan’s emotional trajectory. Even when the third act falters, the narrative’s emotional core remains intact.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early deliver sharp, precise humour as ACs (afterlife coordinators) to Joan and Larry. Aside from a few poorly timed gags, the comedy rarely diminishes the story’s dramatic weight, allowing the audience to engage fully with these three characters and their deeply human, often irreconcilable perspectives. The film interrogates whether eternity entails inhabiting a life Joan could only have imagined or embracing one she has actively built with another. Her equilibrium with the two men grows increasingly unstable as both resist the idea of sharing her, each holding onto a competing vision of what eternity should look like—a celestial stalemate. Eternity keeps viewers off-balance, sprinkling small obstacles that nudge Joan’s choices without undermining her uncertainty. Each path feels valid and committing to one would undercut the other. Her indecision occasionally drags, but the stakes and the film’s inventive flair keep it engaging.
Eternity playfully riffs on romantic comedies without destabilising the genre’s charm. Its tension comes from two very different kinds of love and the captivating characters who embody them, producing moments that are silly, tender, and occasionally risqué. What strengthens Eternity is how it quietly interrogates whether love can be experienced more than once, and if so, how it reshapes one’s understanding of desire, attachment, and the workings of destiny. Above all, it reminds one that eternity is a myth—what matters is the now. Dilemmas and fears are best faced alive (with everyone present, not just in spirit).
