David Freyne’s Eternity arrives as one of 2025’s more unusual romantic comedies, blending screwball conventions with speculative fantasy and an existential twist. On the surface it seems like a familiar rom-com setup — a love triangle, wry dialogue, and situations engineered to make hearts flutter and stall — but the film’s core conceit is its afterlife setting: actors must choose where to spend eternity, and the choice is final. With Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen and Callum Turner at its center, Eternity is imaginative, often very funny and surprisingly thoughtful about love, memory and decision-making after death. At the same time, it also reveals pacing issues and structural incongruities that undermine what could otherwise have been a transcendent cinematic experience.
A simple premise, lofty ambitions
Eternity opens with Larry (Miles Teller) and Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), a long-married couple whose lives are defined by years of affection and exasperation. When Larry unexpectedly dies, he finds himself in a liminal purgatory called “the Junction”: a mundane, convention-hall-like space where the newly deceased are ushered toward brochures and brightly colored worlds that promise infinite variations of paradise. In this afterlife marketplace, souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity — and whom to share it with. When Joan soon joins Larry in the Junction, she is reunited not only with her husband of many decades, but also with her first love, Luke (Callum Turner), who has been waiting for her arrival. Now, she must make an impossible choice: one that will define her forever.
This setup immediately positions Eternity as a romantic adventure with stakes ostensibly higher than those of most genre fare — it is not about a dinner date or weekend getaway, but about infinite life with a partner. The film flirts with genre predecessors such as Defending Your Life and other afterlife fantasies that mix whimsy and philosophy, but it distinguishes itself by grounding its metaphysics in love, choice and regret.
World-building: afterlife as travel fair
One of the film’s most distinctive strengths is its world-building. Rather than a pearly gate or ethereal heaven, Eternity imagines the afterlife as a drab, creatively bureaucratic airport lounge — a space that is both comically prosaic and eerily sterile. Critics have compared the look of the Junction to a Tati-esque hospitality complex or a beige train station that never quite opens onto the sky, an aesthetic choice that undercuts the grandeur audiences might expect and instead turns eternity into an absurd administrative task.
Freyne and co-writer Pat Cunnane populate this world with humorous touches: corners advertising “Man-Free World,” “Museum World,” “Queer World,” and countless other themed eternities, complete with brochures and slick salesmanship that satirise consumer choice. These visual and verbal gags are among the film’s liveliest, suggesting that post-death can be as confusing, overwhelming and arbitrary as pre-death life.
Performances: grounding the unreal
At the heart of Eternity are its three principal performances, and all three actors bring warmth and nuance to what could easily have been flat archetypes. Elizabeth Olsen’s Joan is the emotional core: a woman tasked not just with selecting a paradise, but with interrogating the meaning of love, commitment and nostalgia. Olsen imbues her with a reflective vulnerability that makes the choice less like a predictable rom-com pivot and more like a genuine interrogation of a life well lived — and one still ripe with possibilities.
Miles Teller’s Larry is gruff and charming, the kind of husband who has shared decades of routines, fights and affections with his spouse. Teller navigates this role’s emotional demands by balancing humor with grounded sentiment, giving Larry depth beyond the jealous spouse archetype. Callum Turner’s Luke delivers a different energy: he is wistful, idealised as Joan’s first great love, and at times overtly romantic in a way that contrasts with Larry’s lived-in authenticity. Their dynamic doesn’t always spark the combustible chemistry one might hope for in a love triangle — some critics argue the characters’ emotional distances are not always convincing — but the actors’ sincere efforts often elevate the material.
Supporting characters, particularly the afterlife coordinators played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early, add levity throughout. Randolph’s performance in particular was singled out at film festivals for bringing grounded humor and quick wit, offsetting the story’s denser emotional beats.
Balancing romance and philosophy
What makes Eternity interesting is its attempt to fuse rom-com conventions with larger philosophical questions about choice and consequence. Unlike typical genre fare where characters pursue love without much metaphysical baggage, Eternity asks what it means to make a life-defining decision when time — even infinite time — is on the table. The film’s thematic exploration of regret, memory and the weight of decisions allows it to transcend some of the rom-com blueprint, at least in moments.
However, critics have pointed out that this ambitious thematic reach is not always met with equal precision in execution. One common critique is that the screenplay sometimes undermines its own rules: the narrative sets up strict parameters — one decision, final for eternity — but then plays loosely with them in later scenes, diluting the dramatic tension. Online discussion threads and reviews have noted that once choices can be reversed or the mechanics of the afterlife get inconsistent, the stakes feel less meaningful, weakening the film’s own metaphysical premise.
Pacing and structure: a world that sometimes drags
Another area where Eternity struggles is pacing. Early sections of the film, which introduce the afterlife’s quirky bureaucracy and set up the love triangle, feel fresh and imaginative. But as the narrative progresses, some critics and audiences observed that the story begins to stall. Scenes meant to expand the emotional exploration often loop back into exposition or repetitive dialogue, sapping momentum and making parts of the film feel longer than its near-two-hour runtime. One review noted that the middle section “feels like an eternity,” suggesting the screenplay could have benefited from tighter editing.
Some viewers also felt the film’s main resolution — including an added “second ending” — blurred what might have been a more profound statement about acceptance and finality, instead veering toward crowd-pleasing safety. Discussions of the ending often highlight a shift from a poignant choice to a more conventional romantic conclusion, raising questions about whether the film shied away from the darker or more ambiguous implications of its own premise.
Visual and production design: imagination on a budget
Despite these structural issues, Eternity is visually engaging. The production design turns the afterlife into a patchwork of themed worlds and transitional spaces that are minimal yet intentionally quirky. The aesthetic choices — sterile corridors, dated design motifs, and artificial “sunrise” screens — underscore the idea that eternity, in this vision, is less celestial wonder and more surreal waiting room. This design approach serves both comedic and thematic functions: it adds to the joke of afterlife as a consumer choice and reinforces the film’s grounding in characters rather than spectacle.
Critics versus audience: a split reception
The critical reception of Eternity has been notably mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 78% positive rating from critics, with reviewers appreciating its clever twist on the afterlife and its screwball romantic energy. Many found the film’s imaginative concept and comedic streak infectious, calling it a worthy successor to classic romantic comedies and speculative fables alike.
However, the Metacritic average sits lower, reflecting more ambivalence among some critics who find the world-building underexplored and the pacing uneven. A few reviewers have described the emotional payoff as middling or the screenplay as failing to live up to the ingenuity of its premise.
Audiences, on the other hand, have generally been kinder. Verified audience scores show a high approval rate, with many viewers praising the charm of the cast, the novelty of the afterlife concept, and the film’s ability to balance humor with thoughtfulness. Social media chatter especially highlights its appeal as a feel-good holiday-season watch and a comfort film for fans of romantic comedies.
Themes and emotional impact
At its best, Eternity is less about the mechanics of an afterlife and more about the emotional resonance of choice. By asking a woman to choose between a lifetime partner and a first love, the film surfaces universal questions: What makes a life well chosen? Is perfect happiness about passion or history? Can one truly know what eternity with a person would feel like? In this way, the movie uses its speculative frame to probe intimate human dilemmas, which is where it finds its richest emotional notes.
Yet this emotional exploration sometimes clashes with the light tone. Moments meant to tug at the heartstrings are undercut by a whimsy that prioritises jokes over depth, placing Eternity somewhere between heartfelt romance and whimsical farce without fully committing to either. That dual identity is both a strength — allowing the film to be broadly appealing — and a weakness — diluting its thematic clarity.
Conclusion: a charming, imperfect meditation on love
Eternity is a film of ideas and feelings, occasionally at odds with one another. Its strengths lie in its imaginative afterlife world, engaging performances, and willingness to treat a familiar genre with fresh metaphorical energy. The concept of choosing an eternity after death provides a compelling backdrop to explore love, regret and the physics of choice, and the cast gives these characters a humanity that keeps viewers invested.
But the film’s structural unevenness and philosophical looseness also limit its impact. When narrative logic gets slack and pacing lags, Eternity flirts with the very complacency it seeks to transcend. Even so, this is a movie that will delight many — especially those who appreciate romantic comedies with a twist, audiences seeking something more exploratory than the genre’s usual fare, and fans of high concept ideas wrapped in relatable emotional dilemmas. Its charm is genuine, its ambition is evident, and while it may not reach cinematic transcendence, it offers a memorable journey worth taking — even if it takes its own sweet time getting there.
Final verdict: Eternity is an amiable, thought-provoking romantic comedy that sometimes frustrates with its pacing and logic, but often charms with its concept, performances and emotional inquiry into love and choice — enough to make it a standout curiosity of 2025 cinema
