Eternity opens with Larry choking on a pretzel at a gender-reveal party. For a rom-com, that is the least romantic way to start the movie. Then he’s young again, waking up on a train opposite a kid in an oversized suit. Larry steps off the train at the Junction, an afterlife station where every soul has one week to choose an eternity. His wife, Joan, dies soon too, and she faces a complication when she arrives at the Junction. She finds Luke, her first husband, who was killed in the Korean War and waited six decades to spend eternity with her. It becomes a love triangle of picking who to spend forever with.
Each soul is met with an Afterlife Coordinator and a catalogue of eternities: Beach World, Mountain World, Paris World, and so much more. The station itself looks like a cross between a hotel and an airport lobby where people can wait to pick their eternity or wait for the right person to come to spend eternity with. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early play two coordinators who have seen every delay tactic, but now each is trying to pawn Joan off to the other. Luke, meanwhile, never picked an eternity at all. He took a job tending a bar at the Junction and stayed put, waiting for Joan.
What makes the movie more interesting than the premise is the years of waiting. Luke waited for Joan for 67 years. Larry shared roughly 60 years of life with Joan. The numbers nearly match, but they mean two totally different things. Luke’s love is stunted at twenty-something, never being tested with life’s other difficulties. Larry’s love is accumulated through both the romantic and unromantic times that have shaped his love with Joan. The Junction’s quiet rule of souls appearing at the age they were happiest gives a hint to which time in Joan’s life she was happiest, with Larry or with Luke.
Luke’s devotion is also questionable to an extent. Waiting for one person for six decades is not purely romantic. By waiting for Joan, Luke never chose anything for himself, and his loyalty doubles as a refusal to move on from his only love. Larry’s love had no such gap. The director implies that there is no good guy or bad guy here to pick. Joan’s choice is incredibly difficult, and her confusion is valid.
The cast plays each character superbly. Miles Teller plays Larry amazingly, with an old man’s mind in a younger man’s body. Callum Turner plays Luke with the eagerness of a man ready to resume his love story after a nearly seven-decade pause. Elizabeth Olsen carries the real weight of the film, keeping Joan’s indecision from turning into selfishness. Together, they make it easy to show why Joan loves both men and the difficult choice to make.
The world that surrounds the romance is captivating. Director David Freyne studied production design, and this can be seen from the Junction, an enormous terminal with booths selling everything you might want for your eternity. It is no coincidence that he mentions Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death as the inspiration for visuals and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment as the one for tone.
Beneath the extravagant set designs and different-themed eternity humor, the question Eternity poses is whether love is about what you would sacrifice for the other person or what you have sacrificed for the other person. I’m not going to reveal who Joan ends up choosing, but what will stay with you is the fact that the film refuses to make one side the better side to choose. It’s a choice that might take an eternity to answer.
