‘Eternity’ review: Welcome to the love triangle from hell

Directed by David Freyne, Eternity elevates a high-concept afterlife rom-com into something tender, wistful, and surprisingly grounded.

Eternity glides by on a deceptively light premise: a week in the afterlife to decide where you’ll spend your, well, eternity. Heaven is not so much a celestial reward as it is a bureaucratic waystation. A place with laminated floor maps, pastel kiosks advertising “Beach World” and “Queer World,” and a giant ticking clock that turns metaphysics into paperwork.

But beneath that clever, mid-century sheen lies a remarkably nuanced romantic drama about the impossible math of a life fully lived. If the film had leaned too much on its rules, it might have collapsed under their weight.

Anchored by a luminous, layered performance from Elizabeth Olsen, Eternity maintains an effortless charm without losing track of the bruises underneath. For two hours, it keeps returning to one simple, devastating question. How do you measure the love of a lifetime against the love that imprinted you before adulthood had the chance to complicate anything?

Picking forever is harder than it looks.

The film’s first stroke of identity is its production design. Freyne and his team imagine the afterlife not as clouds or flames but a sleek, mid-century transit hub. Part DMV, part Disneyland, part office where the receptionist sometimes cares that you exist. Posters line the walls advertising eternal destinations like vacation packages. Attendants wear tidy uniforms and hand out brochures about choosing eternity wisely. The architecture hums with gentle melancholy, the way a hotel lobby feels when you’re leaving instead of arriving.

It’s whimsical, yes, but also oddly moving. You feel the weight of choice precisely because Eternity knows decisions require constraints. If you choose one destination, you can’t change your mind later. The specificity of the world—those little stalls, those glowing signs—helps ground what is otherwise a lofty metaphor.

Do the rules make sense? Not entirely. Not even close. And honestly, they don’t need to. The movie works best when it quietly stops trying to justify its cosmology and simply lets the emotional currents take over. The more it shrugs off the “one eternity, one location” logistics, the more it becomes the thing it wants to be. Which is a romantic fable about the selves we were, the selves we became, and the selves we still might hope to be.

Love after life.

Olsen’s Joan arrives in this purgatorial waiting room with the same muddled expression most of us would probably have upon discovering the universe is run by extremely polite concierges. She has lived an entire life of 86 years with children grown, long spent with a man who loved her patiently and pragmatically. And then she turns a corner and finds Luke (Callum Turner), her first husband who died young, waiting patiently in limbo in order to choose his eternity with her.

Turner plays Luke with a kind of idealized softness, a memory more than a man, right down to the faint shimmer of nostalgia in his scenes. Joan’s second husband Larry (Miles Teller) is the other side of Luke’s coin. By contrast, Larry is earthly in the best and worst ways. He’s stubborn, warm, exasperated, palpably real. One man represents the past Joan mythologized. The other represents the life she actually lived.

The movie’s best trick here is refusing to villainize either man. Or Joan. It lets her be confused, even selfish at times, and refuses to call that confusion immoral. It’s rare for a rom-com to depict emotional ambivalence with tenderness rather than condemnation, but Eternity is interested in the murk of things. In how first loves stick with us not because they’re better but because they happened before life got messy. Before grief and routine sanded everything down.

A rom-com that is actually romantic and funny.

What keeps the film buoyant despite all this existential ache is its impeccable ensemble. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early steal every scene as afterlife administrators who seem to have wandered in from The Good Place. Randolph especially brings a soulful comedy that makes the metaphysics feel altogether human. Olga Merediz, meanwhile, gives the movie some of its warmest beats as Joan’s longtime best friend who also recently passed (just go with it, I suppose).

As for the central trio, Olsen/Teller/Turner have the sort of chemistry you can only get when the movie trusts expression and silence just as much as banter. Whether they’re exploring mock-up “worlds” together or enduring a hilariously tacky beach afterlife, their dynamic is lived-in and playful. You believe they’ve loved each other, each in their own era.

Even when the pacing gets a little tangled in the third act—and it does—the emotional throughline holds quite well.

Where the film almost dies.

Speaking of, the cosmology of the whole thing never fully coheres. The rules of “one place forever” strain under even generous scrutiny, and the film knows it. There are moments when you can feel the script tugging at its own logic, trying not to unravel. A few jokes land on the wrong side of twee. And the big clock-ticking final choice arrives a bit suddenly, the film rushing to its emotional crescendo before it fully earns that urgency.

Fortunately, the ending works anyway. Not because the rules persuade us, but because the film finally stops apologizing for its magical thinking and just lets Joan make her dang choice. A complicated one, of course. A choice that balances longing with grief, memory with reality, fantasy with life. She chooses not the best man, but the truest version of herself. Never mind that it’s a bit fatalistic for Joan to even be sagged with this choice in the first place, and when the idea of spending eternity with family members comes to the surface, the film gives it a DreamWorks wink at best.

‘Til death do us reunite.

Eternity doesn’t reinvent metaphysical romance, but it does something a little rarer. It treats love with sincerity in a genre that often hides behind cynicism. It’s sweet without being saccharine, melancholy without being morose. And at its best, it brushes up against something profound. The idea that eternity is not a place but a feeling, a memory, a presence that stays with you even after life ends.

It may not withstand philosophical cross-examination, but it absolutely withstands the test that matters most. Does it leave you feeling just a little more open, a little more tender, a little more human? For me, the answer was I do.

Eternity is now playing in limited release. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of A24. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.