"Eternity is a long time to have regrets."
What if you could choose where and who to spend your eternity with?
An elderly couple, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen, “The Avengers” series) and Larry Cutler (Miles Teller, “Top Gun: Maverick”) are seen bickering in the car on their way to a family gender-reveal party. At the party, Larry chokes on a pretzel and suddenly dies. Soon after, Joan follows, as she’s already dying from cancer. They’ve lived a full life, 65 years of marriage.
To Larry’s surprise, he ends up in the afterlife junction, a transitory place where all humans that have passed away gather. Each soul takes their former life form at the age when they’re happiest. They have to decide how they would like to spend their eternity, and once they’ve chosen, that’s where they will remain forever. They will not be able to change their mind and reverse their decision, so it’s very important that they choose wisely.
The concept certainly looks appealing. The afterlife is an aesthetically pleasing hotel with a train station where trains transport souls to the worlds they have picked. Imagine perpetual paradises, like the beach world, mountain world, museum world, and so on. The station is also packed with vendor exhibits, promoting the worlds.
Each soul is assigned an afterlife coordinator (AD) and the AD guides the soul to make a choice that is right for them. If they’re not able to decide which world they want to go to permanently within seven days, they will have to find work in the afterlife junction.
Larry decides on the warm beach world and almost misses Joan’s arrival when she shows up. Both appear in their strong and healthy 30s bodies, in which they marvel in, leading to age-related jokes.
Guess who’s also there? Joan’s dearly departed, incredibly tall and handsome young husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, only two years after he and Joan were married. Luke has been working as a bartender in the afterlife junction and patiently waiting for Joan for 67 years.
Naturally, this unexpected encounter creates a confusing friction and Joan is torn. On one hand, as a young widow, Joan already grieved for Luke’s death, but now she has a chance to spend the rest of her existence with a husband whose life was abruptly cut short. In the two years of their nascent marriage, their love was passionate and life was blissful.
On the other hand, here’s Larry. A devoted man whom she’s spend the last 65 years with, the majority of her life with, filled with ups and downs, events and milestones. Not just filled with happiness, but also the weight of obligations of an ordinary life - work, kids, bills, frustrations, arguments, irritations, fights, sickness; anything and everything under the earth’s sun. She and Larry already had a lifetime together.
What else is there to explore with Larry? Does Joan still want to spend her eternity with him or start a fresh afterlife with Luke? With Luke, they can finally have their long-lost chance and live happily ever after in a heavenly mountain haven. You’ll drink in the idyllic scenery. Eternity is dreamily painted like a watercolor picture and cool as a perpetual picnic.
Joan, Luke and Larry are given opportunities to visit the library archives, where they can silently walk through a dimly lit tunnel to view living moments of their past lives and reflect. Joan finds herself spending more and more time there and looking back. As the three souls spend a little bit more time together and separately in the afterlife junction, they have moments of realizations and clarity that affect their choices and decisions.
I wish the movie could spend more time exploring and depicting the worlds of afterlife. Imagine seeing a land of milk and honey, a mystical planet of gold, or some Avatar-like universe. But the brief depictions of the after-worlds serve the story. Olsen’s and Teller’s acting are comfortably on point, bickering like a loving elderly couple, even as they appear bright-eyed, in the bodies of their prime onscreen.
The full-circle ending feels simply homey. No regrets. Just like in life, in order to arrive at a destination that feels right and true to the heart, souls can’t skip the journey of human emotions and have to experience those stages themselves.
Who knew ascending to heaven would be this complicated? “Eternity” has an imaginative concept about the afterlife, and the scenes play out with contrasting vibrancy, comical beats and melancholic tenderness, mixed with meaningful twists for a touch of suspense and sweetness.
Like the film “Here” last year, “Eternity” will make you think about life journeys, everlasting memories, and those that matter most may just be eternal.
