This higher concept rom-com actually worked for me. Good job.

Joan wakes up in the afterlife to find it a hotel where souls decide how to spend their eternal life. But it isn’t an easy decision to make; her lifelong husband is here, and her first husband who died in the war… and has been waiting 67 years for her.

Co-writer and director David Freyne (The Cured, Dating Amber) brings us Eternity, an A24 production starring Elizabeth Olsen (Avengers), Miles Teller (Whiplash), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), Callum Turner (Fantastic Beasts), and John Early. The film is your classic romantic comedy setup, but with a high(er) concept twist: our characters are dead, and they are sorting through afterlife bureaucracy and their future eternities. What looks like on face value to be a little cheesy, a little cheap, a little forced, is actually quite affectionate and fun.

The film does start quite slow, though, so we can start with the negatives.

We open with an elderly couple driving to their children’s gender-reveal party (ugh). Joan (played by Betty Buckley) is just happy to be taking part, while Larry (Barry Primus) is an old curmudgeon about it. Not only is Joan hiding her cancer from the family, but during the party… Larry dies.
He wakes up suddenly on a train, now his younger self (played by Teller) and it dawns on him that he is in some sort of afterlife. A bizarre hotel meets transport interchange meets exhibit hall. Everyone here is the age in which they were “happiest” in their life, and they are provided for by an Afterlife Coordinator.

Time passes before Joan also dies and appears in this world (played by Elizabeth Olsen.) She is very confused that two of her husbands are here waiting for her. And both of them expect to spend eternity with her. So what is her choice?

The film’s slow beginnings are purely set up for the concept. We see Larry trying (and failing spectacularly) to adjust to this new reality. Meeting his coordinator Anna (Randolph) and being introduced to the rules, including a smoking gun: “do not go through any red doors”. Larry meets a bartender named Luke (Turner) who, unbeknownst to him, turns out to be his wife’s first husband.

This is all establishment, but isn’t terribly witty. It is laying the tracks down for the freight train of emotions to hurtle down. The rather arbitrary rules feel exactly like that. In this junction you are a specific age. You cannot look down on the world below. You must decide an eternity in seven days. Everything is extremely chaotic and badly managed. Personally, the idea that the afterlife is more bureaucratic nightmares… turns my stomach.

But then, Elizabeth Olsen arrives. The whole film kicks into gear. The coordinators aren’t mindless bureaucratic drones; they have been waiting for Luke to reunite with Joan for over 60 years. Luke himself is unchanged from the passage of time; he is as Joan last saw him. Larry, on the other hand, is violently opposed to this fantasy, and assumes he will live with Joan for eternity.

There is something wonderfully quirky about Olsen’s performance. Teller’s too, but Olsen’s more so. She is really selling the “one moment I am old and frail and behind the times, now I am young again” bewilderment. Without need of crass or vulgar humour. A lot of it is in her expressions, body-language and line deliveries. The casting of their older selves was excellent, which surely helped, but it was very convincing.

Of course, this is all very classic rom-com. Who will she choose? The odd but stable one? Or the devilishly handsome / out of her league one? For some audiences, the result might be obvious. While the film does feel a little predictable, even for me, it does do some things that might surprise even veteran fans of the genre. Callum Turner’s Luke is interesting; a soldier’s vigil and loyalty, blown way out of proportion with the literal sea of death. Yet… this is why his waiting 67 years is surreally plausible. Is it… a bit strange, though?

There’s plenty of silly, goofy comedy in here. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early are eating up the scenery with campy delivery and epic side-eyes. Bouncing off the resoundingly straight trio of main characters. The final act has some unique concepts and thrills, diving between different memories and traversing across time and space.

All in all, I was positively moved by Eternity. I wasn’t expecting much; and maybe the film had simply soared over the low bar I had set. But it hit my sentimental side really hard, on multiple occasions. It seemed like the theatre audience also enjoyed it in all the correct ways.

If you enjoy romantic comedies, and even if you are a little wary of them, you could do worse.