{"id":10042714,"date":"2025-11-27T04:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T09:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10042714"},"modified":"2025-11-27T04:01:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T09:01:12","slug":"eternity-review-a-good-take-on-the-great-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/11\/27\/eternity-review-a-good-take-on-the-great-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Eternity’ Review: A good take on the great beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Freyne\u2019s Eternity<\/em><\/strong> breaks one of the cardinal rules of first-date cinema \u2014 for the love of God, unless you\u2019re absolutely certain the person is sufficiently cool with talking about death, do not <\/em>bring that subject up in your multiplex selection and, in fact, you should at all times pretend that it doesn\u2019t exist and that you both are immortals unless you\u2019re hot enough to get away with it \u2014 but still winds up being what I\u2019d think of (aside from maybe Roofman<\/em>) as the best pairing with a dinner and dessert that has come out of Hollywood in 2025. That\u2019s high praise in a world saturated in superheroes and the elevated-horror-director du jour, and though it can\u2019t really live up to Albert Brooks\u2019 Defending Your Life<\/em>, its spiritual predecessor, it is one of the most thoroughly pleasant<\/em> movies to ever come out of A24. Had we found ourselves in a different world with a different Hollywood, perhaps there\u2019d be more films like this at the cinema each week, but Eternity<\/em> stands out precisely because of how out-of-step it is with current trends, and how delightfully it\u2019s able to imagine a love triangle between three appealing leads in the uniquely-realized setting of its great beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Larry (Barry Primus) and June Cutler (Betty Buckley) are your average great-grandparents. You know the type \u2014 they\u2019re the ones holding up traffic while their ancient station wagon sputters through stop signs and red lights, seemingly impervious to flipped birds and honks while they jokingly bicker about ideal vacation destinations, and so on. They\u2019ve been married for sixty-something years and are on the way to visit their great-granddaughter for her birthday. June is terminally ill, Larry\u2019s the only one who knows she\u2019s sick, and they agree not to mention it, not wanting to spoil the day with thoughts of tragedy. That plan goes out the window when Larry winds up accidentally dying from a cause I won\u2019t spoil (it is used amusingly as a recurring gag) \u2014 but it\u2019s not like Larry knows it. He wakes up on a train, as if the entirety of that day had been a dream. Or maybe this is the dream \u2014 after all, he\u2019s sitting across from a kid wearing a business suit much, much too big for him. He also feels better, and a look in the glass only confirms it. Larry (Miles Teller) is a young man again, and his destination is purgatory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After spending plenty of time waiting in its arrival terminal, Larry is finally introduced to Anna (the always-delightful Da\u2019Vine Joy Randolph), his \u201cafterlife coordinator,\u201d who is essentially a social worker meant to help Larry find the heaven meant for him. See, heaven (or \u201ceternity\u201d as is the preferred nomenclature) isn\u2019t Disneyland, where one can wander from attraction to attraction. There are thousands of eternities from which a recently deceased person can choose to spend forever. Sure, they\u2019ve got the usual heavens you\u2019d expect from a faith-based life, specific to each denomination, but they\u2019ve got plenty of others. Hate wearing clothes? You\u2019ll love Nudist Eternity. Want to live in a world in which Weimar Germany never fell, and you can have Cabaret<\/em> every day? Weimar Eternity. Worship Satan? Sure enough, there\u2019s a Satanist eternity for you to perform black masses in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As such, this purgatory is more like a convention center, surrounded by \u201870s-styled cylindrical hotels, with a show floor on the ground, full of booths and vendors hawking their wares. It\u2019s a lot to take in, hence why the dearly-arrived are given a week to choose, living in not-too-comfortable comfort at the hotels, and if they fail to make a choice, well, they can always live in the crew quarters underground until they figure things out. And it\u2019s important that they do \u2013 your train departure to your chosen eternity is a one-way trip, and should you try to escape, you\u2019ll get your ass thrown into\u2026 the void. It\u2019s the closest thing Purgatory has to a \u201chell,\u201d and is terrifying to contemplate. All in all, it\u2019s a unique and creative variation on Brooks\u2019 purgatory, and Freyne has a lot of fun with the variations.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyhow, on his first night, Larry drowns his sorrows at the hotel bar, and he\u2019s got plenty to be sad about. With all of the eternities and the fact that time seems to pass in the afterlife at the exact same speed, he\u2019ll likely never see June again, and he\u2019ll never see his grandchildren or great-grandchildren grow up. He\u2019s just got to accept that he\u2019ll never have answers \u2013 no one knows if there\u2019s a God up there running everything, or how things will turn out, or even where his parents are \u2013 and he spends some time processing in the company of the bartender, Luke (Callum Turner), who Larry feels like he recognizes, as impossible as that may be. Like Anna, he decided not to go into an eternity when his week finished up, and he\u2019s been waiting 60-something years for his wife to arrive. He\u2019s a good<\/em> dude, sweet, handsome, brave, who unfortunately never got to experience so much of life after he died in the Korean War. Their meeting is brief, but important \u2013 a few days later, Larry makes up his mind to go to a beach eternity, where he can relax for all time. But as he\u2019s leaving, he catches sight of young June (Elizabeth Olson), who looks almost exactly like he remembers her when they first met \u2013 everyone is revived in the afterlife at the age at which they were the happiest. Her illness advanced rapidly once Larry died, and now, she\u2019s here. He runs<\/em> to her through the crowded platforms and up the escalators, and they reunite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

End picture, right? Well, no. Turns out Larry was right when he thought he recognized Luke, as he\u2019s seen his picture a thousand times. He was June\u2019s first husband, and those sixty-something years he\u2019s waited were all for Larry<\/em>\u2019s June. Worse, Luke\u2019s spent the last sixty years perfecting<\/em> his approach to wooing his wife with the help of his own A.C., Ryan (a delightful John Early), and he\u2019s none-too-pleased that he has competition for his beloved. This hasn\u2019t happened in Purgatory for centuries, and everyone<\/em> there is excited to see how it turns out. Will June choose the man that she spent the last 60 years with, who is a doddering old man now in the body of his younger self, with all the frustrations and pains and gripes that come with growing old together; or will she choose the man she never got to experience life with, making the great beyond a new voyage in its own right, with all the perils and pleasures that such a big step implies? It\u2019s a more complex choice than it seems at first blush, and Freyre does a solid job conveying the pros and cons of both men without making June seem cruel or callous. This is an impossible circumstance \u2013 who could blame her for being a little upset?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What brings Eternity <\/em>under par* is the quality of its leads, specifically Teller and Olsen. Their characters are lovingly written within a specific context, and a less-involved set of leads would essentially play themselves as archetypes, regardless of whether or not that makes any sense. Instead, the pair maintains continuity as established on Earth through the transition to the Motel 6 purgatory they\u2019ve found themselves in. They\u2019ve lived some 80-plus years in their former lives, and throwing that out the window immediately would be, well, bullshit. There\u2019s little mockery \u2014 the few \u201cold person in a young body\u201d gags, such as when Larry interrupts June amid one of her first post-mortem panic attacks with an instant solution to her problems: A squat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They spend the next minute rediscovering how good it feels to be limber and flexible, with Freyne pulling back to give us an outsider\u2019s view of the window into their room, showing how objectively goofy the moment is while preserving their genuine enthusiasm and excitement. All three leads hit the emotional notes with a certain amount of grace, though Olsen in particular shows off a flair for comedy rarely seen in her oeuvre outside of Ingrid Goes West<\/em> and some of her early work. Even Turner, who, by design, is given a pretty thankless task in representing a first passionate love made flesh, can make Luke into a character worthy of our empathy, whose presence heavily complicates what you might think would be a pretty easy decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s really not too much to complain about \u2014 some of the comedic diversions, such as when Larry gets \u201cDean Martin\u201d to perform for June and disaster ensures, are a bit distracting, and, at 114 minutes, one feels the runtime\u2019s heft a little too much \u2014 and Eternity<\/em> does enough to get out of Brooks\u2019 shadow to distinguish itself as its own sort of sweet delight. \u201cSweet\u201d is a great descriptor for this film, and it\u2019s so strange to consider how little that quality is valued in modern-day cinema. It\u2019s an appealing flavor, yet it feels as if it\u2019s been put away, a childish thing tossed aside on the path towards a more bitter adulthood. I could see how someone could find this saccharine, but, to me, Eternity<\/em> retains that sort of timelessness, and, should I revisit it later on, I think it won\u2019t lose any of its taste. After all, people still talked shit about Defending Your Life<\/em>, and look where that wound up \u2013 the Criterion Collection, right next to Real Life<\/em> and Lost in America<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* We\u2019ll use the golf metaphor right around these parts, folks.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Freyne\u2019s Eternity breaks one of the cardinal rules of first-date cinema \u2014 for the love of God, unless you\u2019re absolutely certain the person is sufficiently cool with talking about death, do not bring that subject up in your multiplex selection and, in fact, you should at all times pretend that it doesn\u2019t exist and that you both are immortals unless you\u2019re hot enough to get away with it \u2014 but still winds up being what I\u2019d think of (aside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10042097,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[10747,13713,35814,20180,24029,26409,11941],"class_list":["post-10042714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-a24","tag-elizabeth-olsen","tag-eternity","tag-film-review","tag-good-movies","tag-header","tag-miles-teller"],"yoast_head":"\n'Eternity' Review: A good take on the great beyond<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thanks to stellar work from Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller and Callum Turner, David Freyne's 'Eternity' sweetly sticks its landing.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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