by Hudson Moura
David Freyne’s Eternity stages the afterlife as a bustling junction where the dead are given one week to select their forever. The premise is deceptively simple: Joan (Mary Elyzabeth Olsen) arrives soon after her husband Larry’s (Callum Turner) death to find him already leaning toward a beachside paradise, while Luke (Miles Teller)—her first love, killed in the Korean War—has waited faithfully in the station for sixty-seven years. What unfolds is less a metaphysical puzzle than a marital archaeology, excavating a life divided between ordinary security and youthful ardor. The film’s tonal register hovers between drama and comedy without fully settling into either, yet it locates a fragile grace in that in-between space, treating eternity not as cosmic grandeur but as a series of intimate, ethically charged choices.
Freyne’s most engaging invention is procedural: each soul is paired with an afterlife coordinator who shepherds them through a catalog of “worlds”—suburban quiet, Parisian fantasy, wine country, queer utopia, even a Weimar pastiche—rendered as lifestyle vignettes rather than doctrinal heavens. Ryan (John Early) and Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose mordant banter brings crisp rhythm to the film, shoulder much of the comic lift; they are at once case workers and dramaturges, calibrating mood while reminding us that bureaucracy does not stop at the grave. Complementing this is a small, affecting conceit: a cinema-museum where one can screen episodes of one’s life. The question it poses is disarmingly direct—would you watch it all, the missteps and the magnificence?—and the film is at its most humane when Joan does precisely that, revisiting not only decisive forks but also the texture of days that quietly defined a marriage.
A useful analogue is Casablanca’s Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) dilemma. Joan’s choice between Larry (the ordinary life built over sixty-five years) and Luke (the incandescent, interrupted first love) recapitulates the film’s classic moral architecture—duty and fidelity versus romantic passion. In Casablanca, Ilsa’s decision to leave Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and rejoin Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) elevates a shared political and ethical project above private desire; the sacrifice haunts viewers because it affirms a principle (the anti-fascist cause) while wounding the heart. Eternity transposes that calculus into metaphysics rather than geopolitics: the “cause” is not resistance but the truth of a life actually lived, adjudicated through a bureaucratic afterlife and a cinema of memory.
Larry thus occupies the Laszlo position—continuity, responsibility, a long labor of care—while Luke assumes Rick’s role as the emblem of irrecoverable intensity. Crucially, Freyne complicates the template: Joan is granted a week, not a single night; she can review her past rather than act under fog-of-war urgency; and the choice defines not a mortal itinerary but an eternal state. The film thereby echoes Casablanca’s enduring question—what do we owe to love, and to the life that made us?—while reframing its answer from public duty to self-authorship and care, ensuring that Joan’s decision resonates less as melodramatic renunciation than as an ethically coherent selection of the self she is willing to live with forever.
In Eternity, the allegory is spatialized with a neat visual logic: beach (Larry) versus mountain (Luke). If Larry’s impulsive, early selection of the beach seems dramatically premature, the script uses his choice to clarify the stakes for Joan: is eternity the amplification of a life actually lived, or the consummation of a life imagined?
Yet the film’s refusal to choose a stable genre sometimes blunts its moral clarity. The comic architecture surrounding the coordinators can fuzz the edges of Joan’s dilemma, and certain passages play as tonal feints rather than developments. Likewise, the sheer abundance of afterlife “worlds” risks turning inexhaustible possibility into catalog fatigue—an IKEA of eternity—when the story’s power lies with just two options and one week to decide. Still, Freyne threads a thoughtful conceit through these frictions: in Eternity, one does not select an abstract reward but the age, mood, and memory one is willing to inhabit—one chooses not only with desire but with the truth of a life reviewed.
If the film “doesn’t know how well” to handle its issues, it nevertheless asks the right ones. How do we weigh the extraordinary against the everyday when the everyday has sustained us? What does fidelity mean when measured not in vows but in decades—when someone has waited an entire afterlife for you to arrive? And is happiness a summit we reach (mountain), or a shore we keep returning to (beach)? Freyne offers no grand metaphysical solution. Instead, he gives Joan a week and a screen, and invites us to consider whether eternity is best imagined as the most intense feeling we ever knew, or the most faithful life we actually built.
Rating: 3.5/5