David Freyne’s Eternity starts with a premise that sounds like a thought experiment invented to criticize Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.
Imagine you’ve died and woken up in a glowing transit hub. There, you have one week to decide where and with whom to spend forever. The Junction resembles an airport built by someone who has only seen airports in dreams—ads scream the virtues of a “Surf World” and a “Man-Free World”, a sales rep assures you that a “Capitalist World” is “economically stimulating,” and souls wander around clutching pamphlets. It’s chaos with soft carpeting.
Dropped into this cosmic trade show is Joan, played by Elizabeth Olsen with warmth and a touch of existential confusion. She’s barely arrived when she spots Larry, her husband of 65 years. Miles Teller leans into the role like he has been training for it his whole life: a suburban dad with the charm of a domesticated man. The two have shared a thousand breakfasts and forgiven a thousand small annoyances. Their conversations slide into the rhythms of a long marriage, a mix of comfortable banter and affectionate complaints.
Then, Luke appears. Callum Turner, still 20-something and gleaming like a vintage movie poster, has been waiting for Joan since 1953. He died young in a war, stayed young, and spent the next six decades bartending in limbo while perfecting his smolder. It seems hardly fair to Larry (the aforementioned husband of 65 years) to put them side by side.
The love triangle that forms is part soap opera and part existential migraine. Joan isn’t merely deciding between past and present. She’s picking between two versions of herself: the dreamer who once fell dizzyingly in love with Luke, and the woman who built an entire life with Larry. The film sits inside that confusion and lets it churn. No easy answers. No villain. Just the uncomfortable truth that love, after being stretched across years and the afterlife, refuses to behave.
The Junction helps the chaos along. It’s ridiculous in the best way. Brutalist concrete, painted skylines, fake birdsong pumping through speakers. Everywhere you look, a salesperson is peddling something or other to a dead person. Production designer Zazu Myers turns the whole afterlife into an amusement park of misguided optimism. The artifice is obvious, but it never feels cheap. Eternity is overwhelming because life, too, is overwhelming.
Freyne fills this strange world with even stranger guides for the dead. Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays Anna, an “afterlife coordinator” who believes in love to an unhealthy degree, especially for someone trapped in administrative purgatory. John Early, as Ryan, another afterlife coordinator, treats eternal guidance like a customer-service Olympics. The dynamic between the afterlife coordinators keeps the film buoyant, adding sharp humor and levity to the emotional turbulence without puncturing its sincerity.
The film’s emotional weight rests on the performances at its center. Turner brings a wistful confidence to Luke, a man frozen in longing. Teller gives Larry the sincerity of a man who knows his flaws but keeps showing up anyway. His devotion runs deep—stubbornly so. Olsen gives Joan’s crisis a performance with depth, one that taps into the dread one faces when a past partner meets a current partner, takes the stakes, and multiplies them by Eternity. The trio makes the emotional stakes feel real, even when the world around them looks intentionally artificial.
What surprises most is the film’s willingness to let romance be messy. The story never forces Joan into a predetermined answer. It lingers in the storm of her thoughts, exploring the way memory and fantasy intertwine. By the end, the question left hanging is not “Whom does she choose?” but “What does ‘choosing forever’ even mean?” Hard to say. Harder still, when the afterlife resembles a mall hosting a clearance sale on infinity.
Freyne shapes all of this into a romantic comedy that is genuinely funny and quietly devastating. Beneath the spectacle and the jokes is a warm ache, like hearing a song you loved once and realizing it still fits. Eternity is tender and chaotic, a cosmic rom-com that asks impossible questions and lets the answers stay cloudy. It is a conundrum worth getting caught in.
