A supernatural comedy just like Hollywood used to make – that’s the big idea behind Eternity, Irish indie film-maker David Freyne’s arrival in the bigtime, a knowing nod to Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch with a touch of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death thrown in for fun.
To be fair to Freyne and co-writer Pat Cunnane, they don’t overdo the allusions, possibly to strangle compare-and-contrast criticism at birth. Though the plot – a recently dead woman is asked which of two men she wants to spend eternity with: her first love or her husband of many years – feels like it’s straight from the era of The Ghost Goes West and I Married a Witch.
Why should she spend it with either of them, you might ask, something Freyne and Cunnane eventually get around to asking too. In the interim Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is torn between two lovers, first beau Luke (Callum Turner), who died tragically young, and long-time husband Larry (Miles Teller). And while she dithers, and the two guys battle for preferment, two angel-like Afterlife Coordinators, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early, look on with words of guidance and warning and in different ways steal the movie from the leads.
The other great plus of this movie – conception and support actors to one side – is the production design. It seems that Joan has a host of different eternities to choose from while she’s at The Junction, and once the choice is made there is no going back. This limbo is set out like an airport-terminal retail hub, a teeming marketplace where all the various Worlds jostle for attention. Will she choose Beach World, Medieval World, Paris World, Smoker’s World (because cancer can’t kill you twice), Marxist World, Man Free World, Infantilization World, Queer World, or what have you? The Worlds keep coming.
Turner and Teller come across as Cary Grant and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, though neither is entirely sure which one he’s meant to be. More jostling for attention here – it’s a jostly sort of movie – with each man eager to get at the love of his life. Together they push Olsen even further down the pecking order. She’s meant to be the star, but there isn’t much for her to do except look indecisive. It’s a functional role, but Olsen functions very well doing it.
So, a 1930s movie that’s been made in colour and updated with knob jokes, references to BDSM and erections, complete with a very 1930s happy ending, in which X and Y head off into the sunrise together, into an imaginary America, also from the golden age.
This is an A24 production, so money has been spent and thinking has been done. It has high production values and smarts and it will bear repeated viewing, particularly all those incidental gags springing from the various Worlds on offer to Larry, Joan and Luke, and the lickety-spit comic timing of Early and, in particular, Randolph, whose gift for comedy cannot be overstated.
And though it stumbles a touch towards the end, only to pick itself up again and head majestically into the finale, this is a funny entertainment that flies along, as these things must do. The “little Irish indie filmmaker” as Freyne describes himself, did a great job.
Eternity – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
