‘Eternity’ Review: A Rom-Com Full of Life

2025 has been an exceptional year for romantic comedies. With films like Materialists, The Threesome, Oh, Hi!, and now Eternity, adding fresh new takes on the genre. The latter is the most narratively intriguing of the bunch. Eternity follows Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) who has to choose between the two loves of her life and decide who she wants to spend her eternity with. Only one choice and no going back. The options are Luke (Callum Turner), her first love who waited for her in the next life for sixty years after dying at war, or Larry (Miles Teller), the father of her children who gave her half a decade of a happy marriage. The stakes are extremely high and the tension is a joy to watch. With genuinely funny moments and the ability to pull at your heart strings, Eternity is such a pleasant surprise. Read our full review for Eternity below. 

This review contains spoilers for Eternity.

Chemistry and charisma are the keys to making a great rom-com, and Eternity has both. Especially with Da’Vine Joy Randolph. The Academy Award-winning actress delivers the biggest laughs, guides you perfectly through the sentimental moments, and leaves you wanting more. As a society, we deserve a film with Randolph as the leading lady. The love triangle, made up of Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, and Callum Turner, is also played perfectly. My favorite detail of their performances was that Olsen and Teller brought an added layer of living to be older, by altering their mannerisms, while Turner’s character felt much younger than the other two due to his early death. This time around, the boys take the cake as the standouts, not to say Olsen is not great; they are just given more to work with. Their characters have to prove to Joan and the audience why they should be chosen, and that gives Teller and Turner many swoon worthy moments and clever humor to play with. The entire cast is an absolute knockout. 

The concept of Eternity is the kind of homerun, no-brainer story that would be very hard to mess up, and thankfully, it does not. The film reminded me of other afterlife romances, in the vein of Defending Your Life, Heaven Can Wait, or even A Matter of Life and Death, but unlike those, it focuses way more on the idea of life after death. We get small glimpses into the characters’ lives on Earth, but the story is way more interested in the decision at hand and the world it has created. Meaning that despite having other romances set in the afterlife, Eternity feels incredibly fresh. Narratively, the film is extremely strong, until the end. It is too long, and I know exactly what scenes should be cut. It seems to me that the screenwriters were scared to make a concrete decision on who is chosen and did not want to leave the audience unsure if she made the right choice, so they found a loophole so that she could choose both of them. We get a montage of her life with her first love, Luke, and then watch her change her mind and find Larry. I would have much preferred her choosing Larry from the get-go and scrapping that fifteen to twenty minutes that felt forced and like fan service. The ending is strong, though, which makes up for the fake-out ending. 

I left Eternity feeling very satisfied with what I was given. The performances were near perfect, the screenplay was fresh, and audiences are given a clear understanding of how high the stakes are. The biggest surprise of the film for me was the world-building. They did an excellent job introducing us to this version of the afterlife called The Junction. World-building is surprisingly important to me when it comes to rom-coms, like When Harry Met Sally creating a cozy, fully realised autumn in New York and Eternity clearly put a lot of care into fleshing out this world, and it pays off. If you are looking for a new swoon-worthy, high-stakes rom-com that is handled with a lot of care then there is no other place to look than Eternity.

Eternity is directed by David Freyne and stars Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. The film was released in theaters on November 26. 

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