‘Eternity’ Review: Till Death Do Us Part

There’s a warm-blanket quality to Eternity. It’s certainly a less cynically hollow brand of romance than the detritus that passes for romantic comedy these days on the Hallmark Channel. But it’s very old-fashioned in its thinking and approach to fantastical romance, despite some occasional, vague allusions to the fact that it is, still, a 2025 film.

That traditionalist thinking is mostly owed to Eternity’s choice of protagonists, Larry and Joan (Barry Primus and Betty Buckley), an elderly husband and wife who pass away within a week of each other. Larry is the first to find out what the great unknown looks like, and it’s essentially a 1970s train station and waiting room attached to a hotel hosting a timeshare conference. Except instead of overpriced beachside rentals, the timeshares are all the themed worlds where people choose to spend their afterlife, from the classic Pearly Gates Experience to more specialized locations like a Nazi-less Weimar Germany or an eternal Studio 54.

To get the most out of eternity, the dead are relegated to the physical form they were at their happiest, and for Larry and Joan, that was when they were thirtysomethings. After being assigned an afterlife coordinator (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Larry (now played by Miles Teller) is asked to choose where to spend eternity. He, though, waits around for Joan (now played by Elizabeth Olsen) to show up before making a decision, only for the afterlife to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into his plans: Joan’s first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who’s been waiting 60-plus years since his death in the Korean War to see the love of his life again.

As far as high concepts go, there’s plenty of fertile ground in Eternity’s premise, setting the typical rom-com love triangle on its ear with two suitors who both have equal claim to being the love of Joan’s life. The film also benefits from the added playful twist of Teller and Olsen having to play senior citizens thrown back into young bodies. Teller in particular adopts a cantankerous New York accent and demeanor playing against Olsen’s Joan, a character who’s been a grandmother so long that she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself now that she has the freedom of infinity ahead of her. Luke, by contrast, has spent decades as an afterlife bartender, with Turner playing him desperate to the point of near ferality to get his afterlife started.

It’s to the script’s credit that the story doesn’t cheat its way to some sort of modern solution to these characters’ dilemma—yes, that means throupling up is a non-starter—but it also means that the film’s attitudes toward love, sex, marriage, and death feel rather regressive, if innocently so. Right out of the gate, Eternity squeezes its characters into a narrow thematic groove—of comfort versus novelty, new excitement versus old reliability—but the film at least affords its characters the grace of approaching their conflict in good faith.

With the afterlife powers-that-be allowing Joan a trial period in both men’s version of eternal bliss before she makes a decision, the film looks kindly on her. The joy of both her relationships—the quiet, the warmth, the genuine care, and the easy friendship between everyone involved—is on full display in these scenes, even between Larry and Luke once they stop peacocking. The film just doesn’t drill much deeper than that, despite the rich veins of ideas in plain sight. Larry even gets a tiny monologue about how he’s never been the type to examine the philosophy of living and loving all that deeply. That’s awfully shallow for a rom-com in 2025, especially one from the same studio that just this year gave us Celine Song’s brutally honest Materialists.