When Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) enters the afterlife—portrayed in the latest A24 film Eternity as a kind of endless convention center—she is immediately faced with a choice: spend eternity with her Earthly husband of 65 years Larry (Miles Teller) or her hunky first husband Luke (Callum Turner) who died in the war and has waited 67 years to be reunited with the love of his life.
And thus we are dropped into a typical rom-com love triangle setup that has been hyper-fueled by a creative twist and reinvented thanks to that winning premise. While the love triangle could be a tired exercise, there’s also a reason it’s tried and true; upping the ante by making it a decision for all of eternity and also ruminating on the twists and turns of life elevates that basic setup to higher heights.
A big part of the fun is the design of “The Junction,” which serves as a place of limbo while people who have passed decide where to spend eternity, and who to spend it with. It’s a sort of infinite 90s Holiday Inn and convention center with endless floor space filled with booths advertising all kinds of insane setups for an eternal afterlife: there’s Man-Free World (but it’s booked, so you’ll have to wait for the new 445th edition), there’s Smoker World (because cancer can’t kill you twice), and there’s all the traditional afterlife concepts available as well. The film has no interest in wrestling with religion and relegates any of our Earthly conceptions of the afterlife to offhand jokes.
In addition to the carnival barkers hocking their eternities to the newly arrived deceased, there are afterlife coordinators, or “AC’s” which are assigned to a person entering The Junction. Lucky for us, Larry’s AC is Anna, performed by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, while Joan’s is Ryan, played by John Early. This duo is consistently hilarious and really rounds out the cast with some guides to help us get through this strange bureaucratic post-life setup.
The film milks the premise for every ounce of comedy possible, and I couldn’t help but sit with a big grin on my face the first time I saw the movie (and the two subsequent times I have seen the film since). But this is not just a comedy, it really hits the romance and drama beats hard, especially in a fantastic ending. The obvious problem of the love triangle is that there are winners and losers, so if the movie has you invested in all three characters, there’s no way to avoid heartbreak.
Without spoiling the movie, it finds a way to resolve the triangle that I found ingenious and put an exclamation mark on all of its preceding themes.
It’s easy to expect to be rooting for Larry—after all he spent 65 years on Earth with Joan, gave her kids and grandkids, took care of her through cancer. But they establish early on that Larry is maybe a bit miserable, and very average in almost every way. Meanwhile, Luke is the hotter-beyond-belief first husband that never did anything wrong except go to war and die. He seems to have a flashier, more passion-fueled love than Larry.
For Joan, the question is how do you spend eternity? Take the life you never got to live, or spend forever with the man who she has spent her life with? Not making the decision any easier, Larry and Luke are not happy with competing for their wife, and get into some antics that are quite funny for the audience but grating for Joan, who has just entered the most high-pressure week of her existence.
I expected to like this movie coming in, but I left the theater that first time asking aloud to my wife: is this the best movie we’ve seen this year? After repeat viewings, it still holds up. It scratches a particular itch for me as I love a good movie that uses a sci-fi/fantasy concept to explore relationships, love and life. If that sounds like you, head to your theater while you still can and catch this on the big screen.
