Eternity
Dir. David Freyne | ★★★½
What a quietly radical thing it is to make a romantic comedy that never once raises its voice. David Freyne’s Eternity, a 2025 A24 release starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner, follows Larry and Joan — an argumentative elderly couple married for 65 years, quietly keeping Joan’s terminal cancer diagnosis to themselves. When Larry chokes to death on a pretzel (his wife had always warned him to slow down), he wakes in the afterlife as his younger self, navigating a bureaucratic waystation called the Junction, where the recently deceased must choose an “eternity” to inhabit — forever, with no going back. Joan soon follows, and their reunion is warm and immediate, until the crowd parts to reveal Luke (Callum Turner), Joan’s first husband who died in the Korean War, having worked as a bartender in the Junction for 67 years, waiting for her. Joan is given one week to decide which man she will spend eternity with.
From the very first scene to the last, every conversation, every conflict, every small moment feels human-scaled and unforced. Nothing is overwhelming. That restraint is the movie’s greatest gift. The eternities on offer — Cowboy World, Beach World, Smokers’ World, and a Men-Free World so popular it’s sold out in its 443rd edition — give the film a playful, absurdist texture, but Freyne never lets the concept overwhelm the characters at its center.
Two Kinds of Love
What makes Eternity emotionally intelligent is how clearly it understands that these two loves are not the same kind of thing. The romance each man delivers is entirely different, and that difference is precisely what gives Joan such a genuine headache. Luke represents the promise — young, heartbreaking, full of doors that never opened. Larry represents the life actually lived: the bickering, the squats, the flat tires on first dates. Luke embodies the love she could have lived; Larry embodies the love that shaped her. The screenplay wisely never sinks to making Luke an antagonist or Larry a punching bag — both men are deeply sympathetic, and you can’t argue with a man who waited 67 years for you, though Larry is the one who spent 65 years building a life with Joan, with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to show for it.
The Performances
The performances carry it beautifully. Olsen is the emotional anchor, giving Joan a quiet dignity while channeling the comic mannerisms of an elderly woman suddenly returned to a young body. Teller plays Larry with the specific energy of a man who is crotchety and loving in equal measure, and his rapport with Da’Vine Joy Randolph as his afterlife coordinator is a consistent delight.
The Ending
The final act is where the film’s emotional logic crystallizes. Larry, in a selfless gesture, tells Joan to go with Luke. But in Luke’s eternity, Joan finds herself haunting the Archives, reliving memories with Larry — realizing that love isn’t one incandescent moment but a million ordinary ones. With Luke’s blessing, she escapes and finds Larry, who has taken up his old bartending post at the Junction, waiting. It’s probably the only ending that would feel true: Larry and Joan, together in a discontinued eternity reminiscent of their home in Oakdale. Not paradise. Just their life, continued. Joan and Luke never got the life they planned — the war took that — but she had a life with Larry, and that life, with all its imperfections and accumulated weight, outweighs even the most romantic of what-ifs.
Some critics found the middle stretch repetitive as Joan agonizes over her decision, and the pacing does sag somewhat. But that patience also feels fitting — this is, after all, a story about the slow, irreversible weight of a life well-lived. Eternity is not a film that shouts. It earns its ending the same way a long marriage earns its happiness: not all at once, but over time.