'Eternity' and the Unbearable Tenderness of Choosing Forever
By Natalie McCarty
“All we are is a collection of memories.”
A24’s newest film, Eternity, is a tender, surprisingly funny meditation on love’s endurance, its fragility, and the difficult, beautiful work of choosing someone again and again across a lifetime… or beyond one.
Image Courtesy of A24
As Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is asked to decide who she wants to spend the afterlife with, we’re pushed into the same emotional terrain she’s navigating and the lingering question beneath all of it: What would you do for love?
Would you wait 67 years for one more chance?
Would you sacrifice everything you built for your partner’s shot at happiness?
What is happiness? What is love? And when grief ends… what actually carries us forward?
Still from Eternity (2025)
We meet our characters in the “Hub,” a surreal afterlife waystation that looks like a cross between a convention and Union Station. Souls land there after death, and they’re given a week to choose who they want to spend eternity with.
Olsen plays Joan with tenderness, as though every memory is a room she’s entering for the first time after years away. The film asks her to sit between two lives: the one she built with Larry (Miles Teller) and with whom she shared 65 years of marriage, and the one she never got to finish with Luke, played by Callum Turner. Together, the three form a constellation of love in different stages: the steady love, the unfinished love, and the love that must choose between them.
Still from Eternity (2025)
Let it be known from the start: I was team Miles Teller from the jump, and I never once wavered. That’s my guy! His performance as Larry, a man defined not by grand gestures but by the steadiness of devotion, anchors the film with a kind of emotional gravity. He is a joy to watch in this, as is the entire cast.
What keeps Eternity from buckling under the weight of its own emotion is how genuinely funny it is. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a burst of life in a film about the afterlife, grounding every scene she’s in with humor that is just so delightfully her. And John Early is the unexpected MVP, elevating each moment with an ease that makes the humor feel natural rather than forced. The humor actually sharpens the emotion of the film.
Still from Eternity (2025)
As the story unfolds, Eternity becomes less about choosing a partner and more about choosing a version of yourself. The film asks with sincerity: What does a lifetime mean when weighed against the truth of who you became within it?
Still from Eternity (2025)
By the time Joan makes her decision, the film trusts the audience enough not to over-explain it. Her choice feels inevitable in a way that isn’t predictable but deeply human. She chooses not a fantasy or a ghost of what could have been, but the truth of the life she lived. There’s something profoundly moving in that. It’s a reminder that love is not defined by the moments we replay in our heads, but by the ones we return to when everything else falls away.
Eternity is the rare film that explores the afterlife not with fear or spectacle, but with intimacy. It suggests that if all we carry with us in the end are our memories, then the act of choosing someone — truly choosing them — might be the closest thing we have to eternity.
It treats death gently, as a continuation of the same questions we’re all asking down here: Who did I become because of the people I loved?
