Film Review: Eternity

Eternity
Director: David Freyne
Star Thrower Entertainment
In Theaters: 11.26.2025

For me, the rom-com either makes for very solid entertainment (even if it’s often as a guilty pleasure) or for grueling, nauseatingly unwatchable garbage. This is the time of year when the garbage is taken out in force, and as such, Eternity stands out so far from the Hallmark or Netflix fair that it’s easy to give it more credit than it may deserve. 

An elderly couple, Larry (Barry Primus, Joy, The Irishman) and Joan (Betty Buckley, Eight is Enough, Split) go to a gender reveal party, where Larry chokes on a pretzel. He suddenly finds himself on the other side of the veil, having shuffled off this mortal coil, riding a train headed for the Junction to the afterlife, and now played by Miles Teller (Whiplash, Top Gun: Maverick). When Larry steps off the train, Anna (Oscar-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers), his Afterlife Coordinator, explains the rules: he has one week to pick the eternity he’ll live in, he’ll be there forever and he must choose without Joan by his side — unless he stays on as working as staff at the Junction between worlds. When Joan — now Elizabeth Olsen (Avengers: Age of Ultron, His Three Daughters) — finally arrives, she and Larry both discover that her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald, The Boys in the Boat), a Korean War casualty, has been waiting at the Junction for 67 years for Joan to show up. Joan is faced with an impossible choice: rekindle the passionate first love she lost too soon, or continue the long, imperfect, deeply-lived marriage she built with Larry.

Eternity is a warm and often very funny throwback to old old school romantic comedies that contains a lot of charm and sweetness, building on a clever set up and a nagging pseudo-religious question to create a consistently entertaining film. It’s also quite predictable, and some of the old fashioned sensibilities aren’t going to sit right with everyone. I have to digress a little to say that as someone who was raised in Utah in the LDS Church, being taught that a woman was sealed to one husband for eternity and was pretty much stuck with him forever (while even now after polygamy is “over,” a man can be sealed to as many wives as he wants), I used to obsess over these questions of what you are or aren’t allowed to choose in terms of how you spend your time in heaven, and what exactly makes it qualify as heaven if you don’t have those choices. In comparison to the way I grew up, Eternity is downright feministic in its scenario, yet it ultimately falls into some frustrating tropes and a simplistic (if sweet) ending that acts as a dead giveaway that it was written by men. Still, the character dynamics are fun, with a lot of chuckles, and a number of moments between Joan and Larry are quite touching. As a movie for guys who wear their hearts on their sleeves, or anyone who has ever had to step back and make a choice that they love someone enough to hold that person’s happiness above their own, it’s deeply effective. As a view of life after death where a woman isn’t defined by her relationship to man, it decidedly falls short.

Teller is at his most likable here, playing against type and proving himself to be a terrific light comic presence, and Olsen is simply one of the finest actors of our time and is every bit as good as you’d expect her to be. Primus and Buckley are flawlessly cast as the aged versions of Larry and Joan, and the fact that they feel so much like two performances instead of four separate ones really enhances the film. Turner is wonderfully suited to the “perfect” Luke, and Randolph is simply da’vine as Anna. The ensemble does a great job of lifting up the film, and the comic timing between them is stellar, a fact that has to be credited in no small part to director David Freyne.

I thoroughly enjoyed Eternity. It made me laugh, and it even made me cry. It’s a good date movie and for those looking for an old-fashioned rom-com, it fits the bill nicely. It’s not quite perfect, but not every movie makes it to heaven. —Patrick Gibbs

Read other film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Film Review: Rental Family
Film Review: Jay Kelly