David Freyne’s Eternity breaks one of the cardinal rules of first-date cinema — for the love of God, unless you’re absolutely certain the person is sufficiently cool with talking about death, do not bring that subject up in your multiplex selection and, in fact, you should at all times pretend that it doesn’t exist and that you both are immortals unless you’re hot enough to get away with it — but still winds up being what I’d think of (aside from maybe Roofman) as the best pairing with a dinner and dessert that has come out of Hollywood in 2025. That’s high praise in a world saturated in superheroes and the elevated-horror-director du jour, and though it can’t really live up to Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, its spiritual predecessor, it is one of the most thoroughly pleasant movies to ever come out of A24. Had we found ourselves in a different world with a different Hollywood, perhaps there’d be more films like this at the cinema each week, but Eternity stands out precisely because of how out-of-step it is with current trends, and how delightfully it’s able to imagine a love triangle between three appealing leads in the uniquely-realized setting of its great beyond.
Larry (Barry Primus) and June Cutler (Betty Buckley) are your average great-grandparents. You know the type — they’re the ones holding up traffic while their ancient station wagon sputters through stop signs and red lights, seemingly impervious to flipped birds and honks while they jokingly bicker about ideal vacation destinations, and so on. They’ve been married for sixty-something years and are on the way to visit their great-granddaughter for her birthday. June is terminally ill, Larry’s the only one who knows she’s sick, and they agree not to mention it, not wanting to spoil the day with thoughts of tragedy. That plan goes out the window when Larry winds up accidentally dying from a cause I won’t spoil (it is used amusingly as a recurring gag) — but it’s not like Larry knows it. He wakes up on a train, as if the entirety of that day had been a dream. Or maybe this is the dream — after all, he’s sitting across from a kid wearing a business suit much, much too big for him. He also feels better, and a look in the glass only confirms it. Larry (Miles Teller) is a young man again, and his destination is purgatory.
After spending plenty of time waiting in its arrival terminal, Larry is finally introduced to Anna (the always-delightful Da’Vine Joy Randolph), his “afterlife coordinator,” who is essentially a social worker meant to help Larry find the heaven meant for him. See, heaven (or “eternity” as is the preferred nomenclature) isn’t Disneyland, where one can wander from attraction to attraction. There are thousands of eternities from which a recently deceased person can choose to spend forever. Sure, they’ve got the usual heavens you’d expect from a faith-based life, specific to each denomination, but they’ve got plenty of others. Hate wearing clothes? You’ll love Nudist Eternity. Want to live in a world in which Weimar Germany never fell, and you can have Cabaret every day? Weimar Eternity. Worship Satan? Sure enough, there’s a Satanist eternity for you to perform black masses in.
As such, this purgatory is more like a convention center, surrounded by ‘70s-styled cylindrical hotels, with a show floor on the ground, full of booths and vendors hawking their wares. It’s a lot to take in, hence why the dearly-arrived are given a week to choose, living in not-too-comfortable comfort at the hotels, and if they fail to make a choice, well, they can always live in the crew quarters underground until they figure things out. And it’s important that they do – your train departure to your chosen eternity is a one-way trip, and should you try to escape, you’ll get your ass thrown into… the void. It’s the closest thing Purgatory has to a “hell,” and is terrifying to contemplate. All in all, it’s a unique and creative variation on Brooks’ purgatory, and Freyne has a lot of fun with the variations.
Anyhow, on his first night, Larry drowns his sorrows at the hotel bar, and he’s got plenty to be sad about. With all of the eternities and the fact that time seems to pass in the afterlife at the exact same speed, he’ll likely never see June again, and he’ll never see his grandchildren or great-grandchildren grow up. He’s just got to accept that he’ll never have answers – no one knows if there’s a God up there running everything, or how things will turn out, or even where his parents are – and he spends some time processing in the company of the bartender, Luke (Callum Turner), who Larry feels like he recognizes, as impossible as that may be. Like Anna, he decided not to go into an eternity when his week finished up, and he’s been waiting 60-something years for his wife to arrive. He’s a good dude, sweet, handsome, brave, who unfortunately never got to experience so much of life after he died in the Korean War. Their meeting is brief, but important – a few days later, Larry makes up his mind to go to a beach eternity, where he can relax for all time. But as he’s leaving, he catches sight of young June (Elizabeth Olson), who looks almost exactly like he remembers her when they first met – everyone is revived in the afterlife at the age at which they were the happiest. Her illness advanced rapidly once Larry died, and now, she’s here. He runs to her through the crowded platforms and up the escalators, and they reunite.
End picture, right? Well, no. Turns out Larry was right when he thought he recognized Luke, as he’s seen his picture a thousand times. He was June’s first husband, and those sixty-something years he’s waited were all for Larry’s June. Worse, Luke’s spent the last sixty years perfecting his approach to wooing his wife with the help of his own A.C., Ryan (a delightful John Early), and he’s none-too-pleased that he has competition for his beloved. This hasn’t happened in Purgatory for centuries, and everyone there is excited to see how it turns out. Will June choose the man that she spent the last 60 years with, who is a doddering old man now in the body of his younger self, with all the frustrations and pains and gripes that come with growing old together; or will she choose the man she never got to experience life with, making the great beyond a new voyage in its own right, with all the perils and pleasures that such a big step implies? It’s a more complex choice than it seems at first blush, and Freyre does a solid job conveying the pros and cons of both men without making June seem cruel or callous. This is an impossible circumstance – who could blame her for being a little upset?
What brings Eternity under par* is the quality of its leads, specifically Teller and Olsen. Their characters are lovingly written within a specific context, and a less-involved set of leads would essentially play themselves as archetypes, regardless of whether or not that makes any sense. Instead, the pair maintains continuity as established on Earth through the transition to the Motel 6 purgatory they’ve found themselves in. They’ve lived some 80-plus years in their former lives, and throwing that out the window immediately would be, well, bullshit. There’s little mockery — the few “old person in a young body” gags, such as when Larry interrupts June amid one of her first post-mortem panic attacks with an instant solution to her problems: A squat.
They spend the next minute rediscovering how good it feels to be limber and flexible, with Freyne pulling back to give us an outsider’s view of the window into their room, showing how objectively goofy the moment is while preserving their genuine enthusiasm and excitement. All three leads hit the emotional notes with a certain amount of grace, though Olsen in particular shows off a flair for comedy rarely seen in her oeuvre outside of Ingrid Goes West and some of her early work. Even Turner, who, by design, is given a pretty thankless task in representing a first passionate love made flesh, can make Luke into a character worthy of our empathy, whose presence heavily complicates what you might think would be a pretty easy decision.
There’s really not too much to complain about — some of the comedic diversions, such as when Larry gets “Dean Martin” to perform for June and disaster ensures, are a bit distracting, and, at 114 minutes, one feels the runtime’s heft a little too much — and Eternity does enough to get out of Brooks’ shadow to distinguish itself as its own sort of sweet delight. “Sweet” is a great descriptor for this film, and it’s so strange to consider how little that quality is valued in modern-day cinema. It’s an appealing flavor, yet it feels as if it’s been put away, a childish thing tossed aside on the path towards a more bitter adulthood. I could see how someone could find this saccharine, but, to me, Eternity retains that sort of timelessness, and, should I revisit it later on, I think it won’t lose any of its taste. After all, people still talked shit about Defending Your Life, and look where that wound up – the Criterion Collection, right next to Real Life and Lost in America.
* We’ll use the golf metaphor right around these parts, folks.