Warning: This post contains spoilers for Eternity
Death comes suddenly in Eternity, but the story that follows moves with a slower rhythm. After bickering with his wife in the car on the way to a family gender-reveal party, Larry (Barry Primus) dies choking on a pretzel: one moment surrounded by children and grandchildren, the next jolted awake on a train, decades younger (now played by Miles Teller). He still thinks like an octogenarian, grumbling and sentimental, but the world around him has shifted into something unfamiliar—a mid-century hotel-like waystation crowded with equally bewildered souls.
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This is the Junction, the film’s gently absurd, bureaucratic bridge to the afterlife. Everyone who arrives is assigned an Afterlife Coordinator and given seven days to choose one of many flavors of eternity. Beach World. Smokers World (“because cancer can’t kill you twice”). A nudist colony where it’s always 72 degrees. A Paris from the ’60s where everyone speaks English. The Junction itself feels suspended between decades: sleek halls, scenic canvases, and brutalist geometry softened by romantic skylines. It’s built to resemble utopia but registers as an artificial paradise, the sort designed to sell forever the way hawkers on a convention floor sell timeshares.
Larry wants something simpler: for Joan (Betty Buckley), his wife of 65 years, to arrive so they can choose an eternity together. Until then, he waits in his younger body for the woman who was his ballast.
But Eternity isn’t a fable about uncomplicated devotion—it’s about longing, memory, and the collision between the life you lived and the life you once imagined. David Freyne, the film’s director and co-writer, frames it as “the dilemma of choosing between your first great love and your last great love.” Inspired by films like The Wizard of Oz and A Matter of Life and Death, he wanted to build an afterlife where fantasy opens the door to something grounded. With Eternity, that clarity rests with Joan—and with a choice only she can make.
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When the past walks back into the frame
Joan dies not long after Larry, from cancer, a diagnosis they kept quiet at first. Like Larry, she arrives as a youthful version of herself—you arrive at the Junction at the age when you were happiest. She’s played by Elizabeth Olsen: bright-eyed, startled, limber hips restored. Their reunion picks up right where they left off—“I told you to slow down on the pretzels!” she scolds—until the crowd parts and we see Luke (Callum Turner), the husband Joan married young and lost in the Korean War two years later. His eternity has been one long vigil. He never moved on; instead, he held off on eternity (choosing one is an irreversible decision) and tended bar in the Junction for 67 years, waiting for her.
Olsen describes Joan’s shock as almost cellular. “I can’t imagine how overwhelmed one must be,” she says. “You’ve made these decisions because you thought the world was finite. Now, all of a sudden it continues, and how maddening it is. The woman you’ve become is different than the woman you were.” Luke represents the promise of a life she never got to live; Larry represents the one she actually built.
Joan reels. Larry bristles. Both men want forever with her; neither wants to share her. To help Joan find clarity, Coordinators Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early) bend the rules: she’ll spend one day inside each man’s chosen world before making her decision.
Two eternities, two versions of a life
Luke’s eternity is a mountain paradise—quiet, romantic, held in the amber of a love cut short. He leads Joan to the Archives, where long, dim tunnels hold memories that come to life as life-sized moving dioramas. Their brief marriage plays out before her: how they met, their first dinner, the night he said he loved her, their wedding, and the wrenching goodbye before he left for war—still, she says, the “worst day” of her life.
Larry chooses Beach World: sunny, crowded, imperfect. “This would have been a nice vacation,” Joan says. Their old rhythm slips back into place; the lightness fades into reflection. Joan recounts his funeral. Together they revisit their first date: the flat tire, the nervous charm, Larry trying to make everything okay. She recalls the “wonderful life” they shared, but also the ache at the center of her dilemma. “I never had a chance to start a life with Luke,” she says.
What stands out is how the worlds rhyme. Luke embodies the love she could have lived; Larry embodies the love that shaped her. “They’re both great, sincere loves,” Freyne says. And the film scatters reflections of connection everywhere: Joan’s friend Karen (Olga Merediz), who discovered a new part of herself after her husband died, kindling a brief love with another woman before returning to the family she’d built; Anna and Ryan, bickering their way into something quietly affectionate. Even the available eternities—Men-Free World, Queer World, Capitalism World—play like philosophical sketches of what happiness might look like.
Joan’s choice isn’t just about romance—it’s about which truth aligns with the woman she is now.
A quiet change of heart
When decision day arrives, Joan initially chooses neither man. The beauty of life, she says, is that it ends—and its finiteness gave her days their weight and meaning. She wants to imagine an eternity on her own terms.
Larry is stunned but instinctively generous. As Joan boards the train to Paris Land with Karen, he notices her hair—longer than she ever wore it with him—and realizes she must have been happiest in the life she shared with Luke. The recognition reinforces for him that what he’s about to do feels right, so he urges her to choose that life. “You deserve a shot at that love, that fiery, sparky kind,” he tells her. It’s an act of selflessness that defined their marriage. He wants her happiness even at the cost of his own—and she listens.
In Luke’s world, nostalgia blooms. They picnic, drink wine. He marvels at the blue sky, the cold river. But Joan keeps returning to the Archives. She lingers at memories of the life she actually lived: meeting Larry while shelving books at the library, raising their son, the long seasons of ordinary days. One moment keeps pulling her—an argument so small it barely registered at the time, that tiny flare of irritation in the car before the gender-reveal party, before Larry’s death. The same moment now feels unexpectedly tender. “It’s the comfort that we want in a long relationship, an ease with each other that only comes with time,” Freyne says. Olsen agrees: “Those moments that drive the other person crazy are the things you love about them most.”
Luke reflects who she might have been. Larry shaped who she became. What draws her back to Larry isn’t nostalgia but recognition: her adult self was forged inside the life they built. His love wasn’t frozen in youth—it grew with her, deepening through each season of their lives. “I can’t pretend my life didn’t continue without you,” Joan tells Luke.
He understands. He even distracts the Archives employee so Joan can slip inside once more. She moves through memory after memory, searching for the life she now knows she wants.
Looking back to look forward
When Joan finally returns to the Junction—narrowly escaping the authorities who are pursuing her, because it is forbidden to return there from your chosen eternity—Anna and Ryan lead her to the bar: red carpeting, worn mahogany, a room that feels lived-in. Larry stands with his back turned, polishing glasses the way Luke once did. He’s abandoned Beach World and taken Luke’s old job—a quiet acknowledgment that eternity without Joan isn’t paradise. If he couldn’t have her, he’d choose to be useful.
It’s a fragile moment. Joan’s face floods with relief. “I know what I want now,” she tells him. Larry turns with complete understanding, as if he knew all along where this would lead. “We didn’t want it to be expected, but it should feel right,” Freyne says. “She’s choosing the love that reflects who she is now more than anything, and in many ways, that’s choosing herself.”
When Joan admits Mountain World was “just cold,” Larry smiles. “I know a place,” he offers. “When do we leave?” she asks.
In the quiet final scene, they step onto a familiar suburban street—tree-lined, sunlit, unmistakably theirs—as the day eases toward dusk. Larry studies the view, so much like Oakdale, their old neighborhood. “It’s perfect,” Joan says, slipping her arm around him.
Instead of an engineered paradise, they choose something more ordinary and true. “For them, eternity is kind of where they lived: the world they came from,” Freyne says.
Their life wasn’t operatic; their love wasn’t tempestuous. But it was real: the arguments, burdens, the comfort earned over years. Joan understands that their circumscribed lives now give their eternity its meaning. Lasting love isn’t forged through infinite choices but through the one you keep returning to.
For Olsen, Eternity reflects the moment we’re living in. “We’re always being told that there’s something better out there,” she says. “There’s a better toothbrush than the one you use, there’s a better hair product. We’ll just give you all this information for you to consume and make choices and be overwhelmed by all these choices.” Against that backdrop, clarity becomes its own kind of grace. “What really is clear at the end is the person that she’s been with this whole time has been a choice every day, every year.”
By the end, Eternity suggests that the afterlife looks less like perfection and more like full understanding. Walking into that ordinary sunset isn’t purely for nostalgia. It’s Joan’s final truth: a life chosen, a love lived fully, and the person she grew into with the man who grew with her. For a film about forever, Eternity lands somewhere deeply human: forever is just another way of saying every single day, together.