Starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner

Directed by David Freyne

A24 – in Cinemas Now

In an afterlife, where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity, Joan has to choose between the man she spent her life with or her first love, who died young and has waited 67 years for her to arrive.

The rules – enunciated more than once in the opening act of David Freyne’s fantasy romcom, Eternity – are very clear… and there are lots of them. When you die, you revert to the age in your life when you were happiest, and go to a sort of 1980s sales convention of the numerous afterlives on offer. You then have precisely seven days, staying in a sort of four star hotel suite, to choose not only where you are going to spend the rest of eternity, but who you are going to spend it with. After the seven days, if you fail to make a choice, you have to go and live in a windowless box room in the basement, until you finally make up your mind. Once you’ve made the choice, there is absolutely no going back, and if you try to escape through a ‘red door’ you will be apprehended and thrown into a black void with no way out… ever. Got that?

So far, so interesting, especially when Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is forced to choose between dependable Larry (Miles Teller), with whom she spent her life and had a family, or hunky Luke (Callum Turner), her first love, who was killed in action during the Korean War.

Well, I say interesting, but this complicated rubric has its downsides.

When Larry pre-deceases Joan there are certainly plenty of amusing moments as he’s introduced this fun iteration of the hereafter, but then Joan arrives and the rivalry kicks off, at which point Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane, realise that they’ve written themselves into a corner. If there’s truly just one choice for Joan then the movie will be over in half an hour. Consequently, they have to abandon pretty much all of the rules we’ve been trying to get our heads around, and have the characters flitting from afterlife to afterlife and back and forth from the sales convention, with no sign of the threatened void.

They also run into a brick wall with the casting of Elizabeth Olsen as Joan. According to the set-up, while the elderly Joan (Betty Buckley) is supposed to be 87 when she dies, in the afterlife she’s Olsen’s 36. So, if Joan was happiest at that age, that was fifteen years into her marriage with Larry, so (spoiler alert) the story can only go one way. For there to be any doubt, Joan in the afterlife would have to be about 20 – suggesting that her happiest days were before she met Miles Teller. About an hour in, the movie starts to vanish in a puff of its own logic, as Douglas Adams might have commented. It just doesn’t make sense with Elizabeth Olsen in the role. This isn’t ageism. Freyne and Cunnane bang on about this rule on multiple occasions so it’s a plot point that simply can’t be dodged.

The film’s problems aren’t only in its narrative semantics. With the characters wandering ruefully around their own past histories, it falls into the same trap that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey did earlier this year. They are entirely passive, and all the moments for potential change have already happened.

But we could perhaps forgive all of this if the three central characters weren’t so utterly charmless. Miles Teller’s Larry might make for a decent drinking buddy, but Callum Turner struggles with a Luke who is written as little more than a vaguely affable, but uninspiring jock – and Elizabeth Olsen aside from being the wrong age for the part, spends the movie gurning and overplaying the comedy until it isn’t really comedy at all. By the final act I wasn’t convinced that anyone would want to spend eternity with her. For the movie to work, the whole audience should be forming a queue.

Verdict: Eternity has its moments, but, at 114 minutes, there aren’t enough of them for the title not to serve as a pithier review than this one. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com