Some movies remind us that annihilation is always a option
dir: David Frayne
2025
You would think a movie titled Eternity would perhaps lean towards some kind of profound ideas about the human condition, about our lives and deaths and what they mean in the big cosmic picture, if anything. Or maybe you wouldn’t, because your expectations are reasonably low when it comes to expectations about movies produced for mass audiences.
I have to compliment the people who put together the trailer for this flick, because it is a singularly painful trailer that I would think would actively warn people against watching the flick. Nevertheless, I watched the flick anyway, despite the aggressive damage to my eyes and soul, because I’m just a trooper that way.
As trite and mawkish as these flicks can be about an afterlife, and a metaphysical architecture to the universe that actually looks after our immortal souls when we die, there are some great shows and movies that have tackled the concept. There’s the great Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks, What Dreams May Come, the many versions of Heaven Can Wait, and in terms of tv series there’s the hilarious and philosophically dense The Good Place, which I feel is like the main inspiration behind this flick, only further dumbed down for the masses, somehow.
There would have to be something supremely disappointing about regaining consciousness after dying and finding yourself trapped in a place that looks like a 1960s modernist Best Western hotel hosting the shittiest conference centre you’ve ever beheld. There’s countless other souls in the same boat as you, as these weird people with clipboards and matching air hostess-like uniforms shepherd you towards deciding upon an ‘eternity’ for all eternity, before you’ve even figured out what the hell is going on.
Were you Good, were you Bad: It doesn’t matter. All that matters is making an ill-informed decision, and sticking with it f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
To confuse things a bit more, these Eternities are called “worlds”, so you get to decide between Beach World, Mountain World, Food World, Satanist’s World, Gay World (no straights!), Smoker’s World (“Because cigarettes can’t kill you twice!!”), Studio 54 World which has all the cocaine, and, my personal favourite Man-Free World #443 (#444 will be opening soon!) obviously popular with women who put up with a little bit too much mansplaining and being told to smile over the course of their lives.
So, there’s an afterlife, there’s a supernatural yet mundane bureaucracy looking after things, but by the look of it they have limited resources which is why most things in this Junction have the aesthetics of a budget motel chain, and why you only get to pick one Good Place to spend eternity, and can’t jump between them, ever.
It’d probably be a lot of paperwork, lots of signatures, hardly worth the effort.
I’m not pretending that I thought this was going to be a serious treatment of ideas about the afterlife, mortality etc; I had it pegged as light romantic comedy kind of fluff from the start, but there were many moments where I wondered just how superficial and empty it was going to be.
When the film starts there’s an old couple in a Volvo driving very slowly down a road, continuously arguing about every minor thing. This couple is on the way to a gender reveal party for a grandkid, but it’s meant to encapsulate the fact that a) they very old b) they have been set in their boring ways for over half a century c) they know that Death is coming for one of them soon.
Ha ha they ‘trick’ us by having the male of the couple choke to death on a pretzel.
The ‘important’ thing is that however old this couple are, the old guy chokes to death when the younger people are talking about the wife’s first husband, a handsome devil who died during the Korean War.
And then he’s out of there. Because moviemakers assume we don’t want to look at old people all the time, or any of the time, when the old guy wakes up in the afterlife, he looks much younger, early thirties, and he’s played by Miles Teller, an actor who even as a young man looked like he had an older man’s face grafted onto his head.
He retains the crotchetiness and mannerisms of an old coot for much of the flick, considering that his salad days were in the 1950s.
He eventually understands where he is and what he’s meant to do, as in, select a world to spend eternity in, but he has no intention of doing so until he finds his wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), who is still alive at this point.
For whatever reason, despite this place being limbo, it follows the parameters of day and night just to keep the souls, I dunno, docile or something before they go on their way. Despite these people, and Larry, being not-alive, they still eat and drink and get hangovers, for whatever reason.
The first thing Larry does is get a drink. There is a barman, because even in the afterlife people have to have jobs. That barman, you’ll never guess, but he knows Joan too, and he’s been waiting for her for 67 years!
At first blush this looks like a light-hearted comedic take on the love triangle plot device, as in, this dubious afterlife scenario will force Joan to choose either her first love to spend Eternity with, or the old curmudgeon she spent 65 years with, but for all eternity.
Fucking hell, can’t the woman catch a break?
It does become strained, something painful and unpleasant when it really starts to look like “which of these men has the better claim to the prize / trophy / woman?” Much of their arguments start sounding like entitlement, like possession / ownership. “Well I had her first” so, finders keepers rules, or “well I had her longer / had kids with her” possession being nine tenths of the law and such.
So maybe, like me, you would watch a lot of this with this curdling feeling of resentment, until the flick sort of kinda improves later on, or at least I didn’t dislike it as much. And it’s not because I started caring about the characters more or what their decisions would be.
I find the very notion that people have to stay coupled up after death for all eternity far more terrifying than the Christian bullshit about Hell. This notion of heteronormative monogamy multiplied by forever seems like a punishment for both parties, no matter how great they are.
Defending Your Life, even as it had a nebbishy nervous hypertalker as its protagonist, a person who’d been too timid, too frightened to really love someone while alive, who gets a second chance in the afterlife, was about letting go and embracing possibilities a person could never bring themselves to do in life. It wasn’t fixated on some idea that a person not in a state-sanctioned arrangement with one other person is somehow worth little more than a potato at this cosmic salad bar.
But potatoes they all are. Poor Joan. Does she chose a guy she knew briefly 67 years ago to spend eternity with, or a guy she knew for 65 years, for eternity. Eternity! That’s fucking forever!
Everyone keeps saying Luke is perfect (Callum Turner). Even Larry acknowledges it, even as he desperately tries to gaslight his wife into “choosing” him instead, because she’s beholden to him due to their shared burden of history. An even crappier version of this story would pit these two galoots against each other, with one of them being secretly appalling only revealed at the end. Instead, they’re just two guys, with their own qualities, but both ever so needy, demanding that their afterlife won’t be complete if Joan isn’t on their arm / mantelpiece.
The flick doesn’t shy away from joking about how everyone could just be with everyone if they wanted, but it’s not offered as a potential solution for completely arbitrary reasons as some kind of artificial constraint. Some people are shone having fled from their eternities, but The System apparently punishes them cruelly. One chap caught by security screams about how boring Museum World is, and how sick of looking at the paintings he’s become.
Well, naturally. Any of these places would grow dull after countless years looking at the same scenery, no matter how much you might like it at first. Same could be said of the people you’re spending it with too.
It almost sounds like they’re all trapped in The Bad Place? But that would be too cruel for these allegedly likeable people.
Luke, regardless of his age, regardless of how long he waited for Joan, has no qualities beyond having a face that looks eternally boyish. He seems to have almost no other qualities or virtues. He only gets one funny line in the entire film, and it’s about when he talks about the people he slept with while waiting for Joan. Other than that, I’m sorry to say, spending more than a few days with him, let alone forever, would be Hell itself.
Larry is whiny and annoying, and being stuck with him for eternity would still be Hell, but it would be a less openly hideous form of hell, like the difference between a headache and a migraine. His only real pitch to Joan is that she should be with him because she’s been with him, and should continue to do so. He has no game whatsoever.
Joan, other than being played by Elizabeth Olsen, has no other discernible traits or qualities. She was a librarian, she had some kids, that’s pretty much it. She loved a guy, he died in the war, she settled for some other guy, they had a family, ups and downs, then she died, and now she’s apparently torn between her first hot love and her dull second love.
It’s not much of a contest, and I don’t remember caring who she chose, because I also wondered why either of these jerks would be so fixated on capturing her like she’s a Pokemon.
The flick does contrive to have its cake and eat it too, but it’s not a flick you can take seriously for that ending, or to take the resolutions the characters make in order to make one particular person happy for all eternity work in some meaningful way, even if it’s just okay as a way to cap off a fairly mediocre cinematic experience.
Being the weirdo that I am, it’s the in between stuff, the slipping between realities / memories stuff that amuses me more, and there’s a bit of that later in the film (lifted from Being John Malkovich, which wasn’t original when it was depicted there either). It’s the glimpses of how this afterlife bureaucracy works behind and between the scenes that tickles me, like when one of the pretty much useless consultants (Jon Daley) mentions that there are a bunch of discontinued Eternities, many of which were really racist, and you think, this afterlife used to cater to Civil War re-enactment jerks? Why? Maybe God used to be on the side of the Confederates, until they lost?
The ‘best’, most amusing stuff in the movie is in the design, in the edges, in the margins, not in the front and centre dialogue or the interactions between the main characters, and that really shows, dragging down potential enjoyment a bit. But it’s not completely horrible; it’s just a missed opportunity.
6 times I might have chosen the enchanting existential dread of Dreamworld on the Gold Coast had I been given the chance out of 10
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“Maybe the beauty in life is that... Is that things end. You know? Maybe that's what... this is all for.” – yeah but, this place is called Eternity, so no rest for anyone, wicked or otherwise.
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