Eternity “Love gives her two paths

REVIEW TIFF 50 – Eternity “Love gives her two paths. Eternity asks her to
pick one.”
Directed by David Freyne.
Cast: Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, and Callum Turner.
If you like your rom-coms with a weird brain and a soft heart, Eternity is the rare
crowd-pleaser that actually wants you to feel something and think about it afterwards.
It’s glossy, it’s clever, and it’s stubbornly old-school about stakes: this is a movie where
the central conflict is not “Will they kiss?” but “Who will she choose to spend forever
with?” That may sound like high melodrama on paper, and yeah, sometimes it flirts with
melodrama in the worst way, but more often it finds surprising tenderness in its
premise. 
The set-up is simple and delicious: in this afterlife, you get a week to decide where you
want to spend Eternity. Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives to find two different versions of
love waiting for her: Larry (Miles Teller), the husband she built a life with, and Luke
(Callum Turner), her first husband, who died decades earlier. The film then turns that
ethical/romantic triangle into a machine for honest, small moments, questions about
memory, regret, habit, and what “home” actually means. It’s a high-concept rom-com
with a conscience. 
Performances are the glue. Olsen is quietly devastating; she doesn’t slam you over the
head with grief; she lets it live in the small physical choices: the way she reaches for a
mug, the way she flinches at an old joke. It’s a grounded performance that makes Joan
believable as someone who can genuinely love two very different men for very different
reasons. Teller is the film’s emotional center; his Larry is warm, goofy, infuriatingly
steady, and Teller sells the character’s ache without ever asking for pity. There’s a
tenderness there that surprised me; it felt lived-in, specific, and filial in a nice way.
Turner, meanwhile, is the film’s secret weapon. He’s charming and aching in the way
first loves often are onscreen, more memory than person at first, but with enough
mischief and hurt to feel present and human. The chemistry between the three is the
movie’s best trick; you believe the three of them as people who once fit together and
now must find new shapes. 
David Freyne’s direction swings for warmth and whimsy. After his smaller-scale work,
he opens the frame, and the production design is vivid and a little silly, in a way that
serves the film’s tone (I’m still thinking about Beach World and Studio-54 World). The
art direction and cinematography lean into a ’90s romantic-fantasy nostalgia while
keeping things modern and, crucially, human. That said, the film occasionally gets lost
in its own concept. The middle section drags a touch; there’s a tendency to over-

explain the rules of the afterlife, when the movie’s emotional logic would have been
better served by trusting the actors and letting silence do some of the work. A tighter
edit would have made the second act sing. 
Where Eternity really earns its wings is in how it treats choice. The film doesn’t cheat by
turning Joan’s dilemma into a morality play where one option is obviously “right.”
Instead, it interrogates different kinds of love, the one that arrives after decades of
compromise and care, and the one that exists in the purer land of “what could have
been.” The movie respects both. It also avoids easy bitterness about the afterlife;
Instead of horror, Freyne opts for a bureaucratic, sometimes hilarious look at heaven as
a place with options, agents, and oddly specific themed worlds. The humour lands
because the script gives its supporting characters life. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John
Early, as afterlife coordinators, get some of the best lines and physical comedy, and
they never feel like mere exposition machines. 
But Eternity isn’t flawless. The second act’s procedural detours, introducing whimsical
micro-worlds and logistics, can feel overlong. At a few points, the camerawork and
editing undercut intimacy rather than enhance it; close-ups that should sting are
sometimes flattened by busy framing or quick cuts. There’s a pacing problem that
keeps the film from achieving the full emotional payoff it wants in the final act. Still,
when the film lands, and it does, often, it does so with grace. The final scenes are
quietly devastating without manipulating you; they trust character choices over big
gestures. 
Technically, David Fleming’s score is effective without being intrusive: it nudges, it
swells, and it knows when to step back. Ruairí O’Brien’s brilliant cinematography gives
the afterlife a soft palette that’s both playful and slightly melancholy, think candy-
coloured sunsets with a touch of fog. Production design and costuming subtly underline
the film’s themes: memory looks different on different faces, and the afterlife’s set
pieces are as much about who people were as what they want to be. 
If you’re looking for comparisons, Eternity sits comfortably next to films like Ghost or
What Dreams May Come in its blend of romance and metaphysical musing, but it’s
more playful and less tragic. It also borrows rom-com beats and modernizes them with
a queer-inclusive sensibility and a willingness to let nontraditional families exist on
screen without fanfare. That’s a small but important thing in 2025 cinema: to offer a big
idea movie that still lets ordinary people be the moral core. 
Verdict: Eternity will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you argue with your
friend about whether you’d want one week to pick an afterlife. This film is not perfect,
actually. The middle drags in parts, and the world-building can sometimes be
overreaching. The film is warm, clever, and performed by three excellent leads.
Directed by a director who knows how to get an audience to care about the characters
of the story. So, if you like your rom-coms with a philosophical afterlife and
performances that truly feel real, this one’s worth your time. It’s the kind of film that
grows on you. Expect it to be a fall favourite for people who still believe rom-coms can

be deep. “Where do you spend eternity, with the life you built or the love you
lost?”