Despite Elizabeth Olsen’s best efforts, Eternity is missing sharp wit, big laughs and romantic chemistry

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Elizabeth Olsen, left, Miles Teller, centre, and Callum Turner in a scene from Eternity.Leah Gallo/The Associated Press

Eternity

Directed by David Freyne

Written by Freyne and Pat Cunnane

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller and Callum Turner

Classification PG; 112 minutes

Opens in theatres Nov. 26

Can we agree that maybe the most rational – and depressingly cynical – version of the afterlife is a void? Like, just nothing. It’s over. An eternal end that’s impossible to imagine because how can we contemplate what it is to not think or feel or hope or exist.

Sorry for getting all dark on you off the top. But look: Even in a cute and comforting trinket of a movie like Eternity, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller as a couple who had the good fortune to stay married for nearly 67 years, that void hovers like a threat.

Eternity is largely set in an afterlife way station called “the junction,” which feels a lot like a mid-century convention centre. There, the newly deceased, who appear at the age they were when they were happiest, must choose their version of ever after, from limitless options hawked by eager sales reps. It’s a lot like choosing where to live out the rest of your retirement, which just happens to be what the central couple (played in their old age by Barry Primus and Betty Buckley) are up to in the movie’s opening. That is until death interrupts and sends them to the afterlife looking like Teller and Olsen, where they continue mulling over options.

They could spend eternity at a sunny beach, the favoured destination of Teller’s Larry. Or in a serene rocky mountain landscape, which Olsen’s Joan gently prefers. They never really entertain afterlife options such as Manfree World (which is exactly what it sounds like), the Old Testament (ditto) or Weimar World, where heaven looks like Bob Fosse’s Cabaret but with “100 per cent less Nazis!”

Either way, they have to make a choice, a commitment to an afterlife that they stick to for … well yeah, eternity. Should they renege, it’s off to that void. Think of it like choosing a religion – and whatever version of eternity that comes packaged with it – because nothing in this life compels us to commit to such beliefs like a vacuousness that’s too soul shattering to even contemplate.

These are thoughts you could get lost in watching Eternity, not because the movie dwells on such things, but because there’s enough space for us to invoke them, somewhere in the hollowness of its contraption, in which big existential conundrums are quaintly, even satisfyingly, reduced to a classic sentimental love triangle.

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Turner, left, and Olsen in Eternity.Leah Gallo/The Associated Press

Never mind where to spend eternity. This movie is about who to spend it with.

You see, when Joan arrives at that convention centre, just a week after Larry, she discovers he’s not the only one waiting on her. Joan’s devoted first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died young in the Korean War, had been waiting 67 years, serving as a bartender at that purgatorial junction because he refused to choose an eternity without her.

So she could pick up where she left off with Luke. Or she could continue on indefinitely with Larry, who Teller plays as whiny and needy in mildly adorably ways, which Joan has of course grown comfortable (or at least patient) with.

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John Early, left, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in Eternity.Leah Gallo/Supplied

Her decision-making process, which occupies most of Eternity, is a series of competing dates and walks down memory lane, a rather neat way to deal with the kind of relationship mess we assume we’ll be done with when we die. And it’s in these moments, in a movie that mostly gets by on its lighthearted and fanciful world-building, that director David Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane tend to reach for the obvious, the saccharine and whatever’s easy.

These are rom-com setups without sharp wit, big laughs or even the romantic chemistry, despite best efforts from Olsen. She’s giving a soulful and animated performance, which the movie and her co-leads fail to capitalize on. Meanwhile, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early, both playing afterlife consultants, are often left dangling, in need of better material as comic foils.

If I found myself repeatedly contemplating the void, it’s because this movie, as pleasurable as it often is, couldn’t hold on to me long enough to save me from going there.

Special to The Globe and Mail