Eternity
Director: David Freyne
Cert: 12A
Starring: Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, John Early, Olga Merediz
Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins
Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow, is one of many texts that worry a great deal about “the death problem”. How do we face oblivion? Are the supernatural alternatives any more palatable? All that cheery stuff.
We know David Freyne’s charming third feature, following the gory The Cured and the airy Dating Amber, is a comedy because it suggests that the question might have a satisfactory answer.
Others have been here before. The central conceit resembles that in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gem After Life, from 1998: here the dead, dispatched to a sort of trade show called the Hub, have a week to decide in which themed universe they want to spend (ahem) eternity.
The ambience is, however, closer to that of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s imperishable A Matter of Life and Death, from 1946. There is the same borderline-sentimental belief in the eternally suitable partner. The hugely stacked balconies that characterise the Hub feel like a conscious tribute to the architecture in that British classic.
We begin with the last days of an elderly couple. Larry chokes fatally on a pretzel at a gender-reveal party. A short time later Joan expires from a lengthy disease. It transpires that, in this version of the Forever, the deceased exist in the form in which they were happiest.
The good news for our heroes is that, in their case, this was when they looked as the not-unlovely Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen look in 2025.
There is a catch. Larry quickly learns that the holding area’s friendly barman (Callum Turner, the current favourite to be the next James Bond) was Joan’s first husband and, since his death in the Korean War, has been waiting for the woman he still loves to drop in for a Martini. Joan’s choice boils down to eternity with her teenage sweetheart or her long-time life partner.
The films gets a little bogged down in the Hub’s procedure and, tied to that place and its satirically unconvincing paradises, sometimes feels a bit claustrophobic. One ends up longing for a sniff of reality. But the three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.
In cinemas from Friday, December 6th
