Eternity Review
A fizzling, glowing rom-com with a wonderfully interesting premise.
Larry (Miles Teller) dies and finds himself in the afterlife, where his afterlife consultant Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) tells him he has a week to decide on which eternity he wants to spend, well, eternity in. Pressured by time, he picks one, hoping his still alive wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) gets his note and joins him - but on his way, he bumps into Joan, who has died soon after he. They seem set to step into the same eternity; that is until Joan runs into Luke (Callum Turner), her first husband who died in the war, and who she never got a life with. Luke, who has waited decades for her here in this way station.
Faced with a week to decide, Joan has to choose between the man she never got the chance to grow old with, and the man she spent a lifetime with, in determining who she will spend the rest of eternity with.
Eternity is such a beautiful film.
The story is a beautiful, heartbreaking ‘what if’, that will leave you engrossed in thought long after you leave the cinema. It is told with a mix of pathos and heartbreak, along with a healthy dose of rom-com sensibility, that makes this a tearjerker and a heartwarmer in equal measure.
Across the board, the cast is spectacular. Callum Turner and Elizabeth Olsen are gorgeous, and inhabit the early 20th century vibes the ages of their young-appearing characters represent. But they are outshone by Miles Teller, who is truly wonderful. If you weren’t looking at him on the screen, you could almost swear he is really an old, grouchy man - and even when looking at him, his performance is so convincing you can’t quite be sure.
The romance sparkles between all three, and the moments that need to hit go quite a long way to doing so. There’s a small sense that perhaps the real gut punches don’t land quite as well as they should, but that may be fixed on rewatch.
Outside of that, the film has amazing set design and gorgeous, grainy cinematography. The conceptual nature of this afterlife is rendered in perfect cheap hotel aesthetic, and it contrasts well with some of the more natural habitats in people’s chosen eternities. The mountainscapes feel frosty, the beaches just as hot, stuffy and crowded as they are depicted.
This is a movie that will not just have you thinking about it and about your own life and love, but also making a bee line back to the cinema to see it again. A must see on the big screen.
