#TIFF25: “ETERNITY” REVIEW

By Nicholas Porteous

Larry (Miles Teller) wakes up in a bizarrely rules-oriented afterlife, having choked to death on a pretzel as a senior citizen. About a week later, his wife of many decades, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), joins him. They’re ready to spend eternity together. The only problem: it turns out her first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, has been waiting for her this whole time, she’s got a week to pick her eternal partner.

Eternity takes an age-old what if scenario and riffs on it to hilarious near-perfection. It’s full of deep belly laughs and a perfectly calibrated comic cast. Elizabeth Olsen goes above and beyond as Joan, a newly dead woman trapped in a very specific kind of hell. She brings tremendous gravity to the mainly joke-driven screenplay, and carries the memories of TWO soulmates in her bones. Miles Teller and Callum Turner are perfect fits–Miles as the irritable-but-sweet older man reborn into a young man’s body (apparently we inhabit the afterlife in our “happiest” physical form), and Callum Turner as the undeniably more attractive war veteran who left his wife too soon.

Eternity ponders the value of an idyllic relationship cut short versus a lifelong, comfy and imperfect one. The Movie isn’t without seriousness, but mostly plays in a heady comedy space, inventing a series of rules and parameters for the characters to play and speculate within. It never totally breaks away from the intellectual games and into something deeper or more ineffable, and it begins to feel its length around the third act. While I give it points for not wriggling out of a concrete answer for its seemingly unanswerable premise, the journey to get there feels a little long winded by the end–and not as moving as the premise would allow. Still, if you’re looking for an original romcom, Eternity is a charming and often uproarious journey worth the ticket.

Eternity screens at TIFF ’25:

Thurs. Sept 11 at 6:35 PM at Scotiabank Theatre

Sun. Sept 14 at 6:00 PM at Scotiabank Theatre