Eternity (Review)
Why this beautiful piece of speculative fiction is an ultimately unsatisfying version of the afterlife.
Image credit: IMDb
“In an afterlife where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity,” reads the Letterboxd synopsis of the 2025 film Eternity, “Joan is faced with the impossible choice between the man she spent her life with and her first love, who died young and has waited decades for her to arrive.”
I was extremely interested in seeing this movie from the moment I saw the trailer. I’ve always been a fan of speculative fiction, and I’m also a Latter-day Saint with ancestors who practiced polygamy. My entire life I’ve been surrounded by questions of eternal monogamy, polygamy, and what the afterlife looks like for those who have married multiple people, so needless to say, I was intrigued by what this movie had to say about the subject.
And the movie is great! It’s funny, David Freyne’s writing is great, and the acting is exceptional. Visually, the movie is gorgeous; the first thing that I noticed about the movie was how vibrant the color was. In a sea of movies with gritty, earthy palettes and colors that should be vibrant but aren’t (I’m looking at you in particular, Wicked For Good), Eternity was a breath of fresh air. And when you add in the beautiful costumes, makeup, music, framing, and cinematography, you end up with an incredible piece of visual media.
So why was this such an unsatisfying movie for me?
Besides my gripes with Ryan (who is just not a good character imo), I have several key problems with the movie. But as I’ve thought about the movie over the last two months, I’ve realized that all of these problems are actually just appendages to one major issue with Eternity, which is that the premise of the movie is completely at odds with my understanding of the nature of humanity, my personal view of the purpose of life, and what I believe life after death will actually look like. And while I don’t claim that my personal views on these things are the only true views, I do think that I speak for a lot of people’s perspectives on these topics.
Before I continue, be warned that there will be spoilers from here on out. So if you haven’t seen the movie, go see it.
Larry, who has just died after choking on some pretzels, wakes up in a world filled with other people who have just died. After wandering around in this strange afterlife filled with advertisements for places like “Man Free World,” “Medieval World,” “Infantilization Land,” “Bromance World,” and so on, Larry learns that this place is a kind of limbo between death and eternity. Each eternity is different and people have just a week to decide which eternity they will spend the rest of, well, eternity in. Enter problem #1: your choice of eternity is a one-time choice, no take backs. While waiting for Joan and trying to decide what to do, Larry meets a bartender named Luke who hints that he’s been in this limbo place for a long time.
At the end of seven days and on the precipice of choosing an eternity, Larry suddenly sees his wife Joan, who has just died of cancer. Joan is quickly faced with an extremely difficult decision: whether she’ll spend her eternity with Larry, her husband of half a century, or Luke, the bartender who is revealed to be Joan’s first husband who died in the Korean War. After much deliberation, lots of arguing, and even a date with each husband, Larry finally gives in and tells Joan that, because she was happiest with Luke (which is evidenced by the state you find yourself in upon waking up in this limbo place), she should spend eternity with her first husband instead of with him. Joan listens to Larry and heads to an Alpine Eternity with Luke. However, after spending some time in this eternity, Joan begins to reflect on her memories and life with Larry and changes her mind about her decision. Because of this, she leaves Luke and breaks out of her eternity to try to find Larry.
This choice to leave her eternity breaks the single, cardinal, unforgivable rule of this strange postmortal reality: once you’ve chosen your eternity, you can never leave that eternity. If you do, you will be tossed into The Void, an eternity of neverending emptiness and darkness. Here we see problem #2: changing your mind and trying to make other choices in the afterlife is subject to penalization in the form of being cast into outer darkness.
Luke is initially confused and hurt by Joan’s decision. Isn’t he enough for her? She was happiest in life when she was with him; why isn’t she happy now? He’s been waiting for her for over 60 years; isn’t this new chance at a life together something she’s always wanted too? (This is all part of problem #3, which I’ll explain later)
Just before leaving, Joan, in a moment of vulnerability, explains that she was happiest with him because at the time, she was naive. When they were married, they were both young; life was easy and exciting and fun. They hadn’t had to deal with the hard parts of life yet, like mortgages and rent and laundry and taxes. Luke storms off in a huff at this but later comes around and helps Joan escape their eternity so she can find Larry. After ducking into the bar to get away from the agents who apprehend escapees and throw them into outer darkness, Joan realizes Larry has taken on Luke’s old job as bartender and the two of them run away to live out eternity together in a world much like their old life.
As I was doing research about this movie for this essay, I came across a review on IMDb that more or less compared this afterlife to hell. And the funny thing is that I don’t think the author of the review is wrong.
I grew up (and still am) a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon, but we don’t really like being called that). Before we can discuss what things look like after death in Latter-day Saint theology, we need to understand what happened before this life. Before the creation, God created a plan. He would create this world and give all of us a chance to live here, make choices, and exercise our agency. In this world, we would learn and grow and die and, based on the choices we’d made in this life and how we’d used our agency, we would have the chance to return to live with Him again in heaven. God presented this plan to us and asked for a volunteer to help put this plan in action. Lucifer responded that he would enact God’s plan but that “one soul shall not be lost” (Moses 4:1). Jesus responded that he would do God’s will.
In theory, Lucifer’s plan might seem like a good idea. All of God’s children being able to go straight to heaven sounds great, right? God’s response to Lucifer is interesting: “Wherefore, because… Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him… I caused that he should be cast down” (Moses 4:3-4).
The popular interpretation of this scripture is that Lucifer’s plan for everyone to go straight to heaven was contingent upon us losing our agency. We would have no choice in the matter: even if we didn’t want to, we would all do the right things and return to heaven. This was not what God wanted for His children. Agency and choice are literally baked into His purpose for sending us into this life.
In life, we never have just a single choice to make. We make decisions every day. We make big decisions, little decisions, we change our minds, we go back on our choices, we choose to do nothing, or we procrastinate making choices. For Latter-day Saints, death is not the end of choice. In fact, Latter-day Saints believe that life sort of continues after death the same way it does in life. Even after we die, there will be chances to choose and to grow and to learn. In fact, for those who have made those certain choices, in life or after, that allow them to live in God’s presence, there will be opportunities for an infinite expansion of choice and agency and growth after death. In this way, Eternity is a decent representation of the Latter-day Saint afterlife. However in Eternity, although characters still make small choices that don’t really make a ton of difference in the grand scheme of things, the life-determining decisions, like where will you spend your eternity and with whom, is a one-time decision that you must be completely sure about because you cannot go back on it once you’ve made it (problem #1) and if you do go back on your choice of eternity, there are strong and immediate consequences in the form of being forced into an eternity in the void (problem #2).
Latter-day Saints don’t believe in hell. However, if we did, the afterlife presented in Eternity would probably be it: life with the illusion of choice where we are unable to grow beyond whatever we became in life.
This perfectly segues into problem #3: the Luke problem.
Even if you aren’t a Latter-day Saint, you can agree that life is about more than just a single important choice: it’s the sum of all of the choices we make in life. A similar thing could be said about love. True love isn’t something that you just experience, it’s a choice, a daily choice to love that other person. And I think David Freyne (the writer and director) agrees with that. In the climax of the movie, Joan literally breaks all of the rules of this afterlife to continue to choose Larry, the person who she knows she’ll be happy with for eternity. But this choice breaks the system of the afterlife, even though it’s the choice we wanted her to make the entire time.
The problem with rejecting the system at the very end of a story is that it leaves the audience subconsciously feeling cheated. Yes, it’s the ending we want. I know I certainly left the movie feeling satisfied that everything worked out the way it should have, and I know many others who saw this movie felt the same. But when you think about it carefully, what about every other person that exists in these eternities? What about the little boy who died young and is stuck on Beach World creeping people out for forever? What about the guy who was trying to escape Museum World and got thrown into the void? What about all of the other Joans throughout history who chose to leave their Larrys but didn’t have the resolve to go back to them for fear of ending up in the void? Where’s the happy ending for those people?
What about Luke?
Luke is an interesting character. After choosing to forgo picking an eternity, Luke instead chose to wait for 67 years for the woman he married to pass on and join him in the afterlife so they could be together again. He’s described as perfect, and indeed, at the beginning of the movie he certainly appears that way. He’s very handsome, he’s charming, he’s sweet. But there’s also something just a little … off about him. I felt the source of this offness was teased throughout the movie, but it didn’t really hit me until he and Joan were in their eternity near the end of the movie.
Despite 67 years of solitude, Luke hasn’t changed. Maybe it’s the kind of life that he lived in the afterlife (less likely), maybe it’s something about dying (more likely), but Luke hasn’t grown up at all in the 67 years since he left his earthly life. When confronted about his seeming perfection, he denies it only by citing that he had a variety of sexual experiences while waiting for Joan, but I honestly think that it’s just that he’s just as naive as he probably was in life. He’s a young soul that hasn’t gotten older, and when compared to souls that have lived a long lifetime, yeah, he just might be perfect. However, the curtains come down in his and Joan’s eternity when we see that he is just as selfish and unempathetic as he probably ever was in life. Luke waiting had nothing to do with Joan and everything to do with him. Because at the end of the day, in Luke’s mind, Joan was always going to come back to him, the rest of her life, feelings, and experiences be damned.
This is my final problem with Eternity. I don’t think that when we die, that’s it. I don’t think that progress just halts wherever we were in life when we died. If it did, maybe Eternity would make sense. But I can’t reconcile that with the billions upon trillions of lives that have ended prematurely over the course of the history of this world. I don’t think that if I died young and selfishly waited for 67 years that I wouldn’t have learned or grown or developed in that time. I expect to live a long life and live even longer than that, growing and becoming a better version of myself alongside my wife. That’s my eternity.