Eternity is an antidote to the cynicism of relationships Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller and Callum Turner meet in a bar

In the rarefied universe of Eternity, the fantasy romantic comedy by David Freyne with a screenplay by Pat Cunnane, produced by A24 and in theaters starting today, a perfectly ordinary woman with a perfectly ordinary life, played by Elizabeth Olsen, arrives in the afterlife at an advanced age and finds a surprise. Because the afterlife is nothing more than a train station where you stop briefly before choosing your own eternity,  between worlds of sea or mountains, museums or books, parties or boredom, and you return there with the body, hair and clothes from the moment you were happiest in life, but you discover this only once you're inside. Dead and buried, the protagonist must choose between her first husband, a young soldier who died in the Korean War right after their wedding and played by Callum Turner, the memory and regret of a lifetime, and the husband she spent her life with, the grumbler who does everything he can to make her happy, brought to life by Miles Teller. What will she do? Who’s right? Team Jacob or Team Edward?

Eternity: plot, cast and themes of the fantasy comedy now in theaters

The premise is enough, because the conversation has already been had a thousand times, also online. It’s a conversation about love, choices, regret, what it means to spend your life with someone, trying to find normality in an abnormal world, admitting your mistakes and accepting them, choosing one happiness among thousands, someone else’s over your own, the past over the future, surprise over safety. It’s a conversation about relationships, our favorite topic to discuss and speculate over, but it’s also the visual representation of two opposite ways of understanding them: the one searching for thrill, the unknown, the chaotic situationship, and the one searching for stability, which the internet would probably call "vanilla" or "bare minimum." As with Past Lives, we can choose who we lean towards, but we shouldn’t cheer for anyone, because that’s not the point. We might even do a little thinking, if we feel like it.

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The pop, carefully curated aesthetic adds little to all this, but that’s fine. Because even though it’s a slightly naive film that moves back and forth, Eternity is, all things considered, a lovely holiday-season movie experience, and it is also a good response to those who spend their days on social networks giving cynical advice, tearing apart other people’s normality, applying odd theories to human behavior, which is extremely difficult to theorize or predict, and to anyone who insists that love exists only when it is blatantly and visibly painful, intense, unpredictable. In short, it’s a nuanced and complex answer to anyone who refuses to see nuance, to dig deeper, to look beneath the surface. And it makes you laugh.