Elizabeth Olsen in Smart, Sweet A24 Rom-Com

The great Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, from 1991, imagines a bureaucratic heaven that prepares the recently departed for their next phase of existence. The movie is a wry look at the petty foibles of life, the fears and neuroses that can impede a person’s path to fulfillment and enlightenment. There’s a romance involved, but the film is more about the individual. 

The new film Eternity puts the romance right at the center. Directed by Dating Amber helmer David Freyne from a Black List script by Pat Cunnane, Eternity sets two marriages at odds with one another in the afterlife. Larry (Miles Teller) has just died (as an old man) and arrives at a train depot-esque limbo, where he is told he will have to choose what kind of forever he’d like for himself. Will it be an unending day at the beach? A million lifetimes spent as a libertine in Queer World? (Sounds interesting!) Maybe a trip to the political eden of Marxist World — though we’re told that one’s all booked up. 

While he’s deciding, his wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) also dies and the two are reunited in this busy waystation between mortality and immortality. It’s a happy occasion but for one major flaw: Also waiting for Joan is her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), a dashing war pilot who was killed in Korea only two years into their marriage. He’s been holding out for Joan all the while, biding his time as a bartender at Elysium’s version of Grand Central. Which throws a serious wrench into Larry’s plan to mostly just continue on as normal with his wife of 65 years. 

The premise is so cute it’s surprising a movie hasn’t done it already. Eternity mines its compelling conceit for both peppery comedy and bleary sentiment. It is asking a rather complex question, too, one that many couples looking back at their life together may not want to confront: Is this the best it could have been, or was it just good enough? There is Joan’s first love, this tall drink of youthful passion and excitement, waiting to pick up where they left off. And then there’s trusty, maybe boring old Larry, with whom Joan raised a thriving family. Can decades of quotidian contentment really hold a candle to the mad blush of first love? Joan, and I suppose we in the audience, will have to decide.

Eternity ably keeps the audience guessing which way she’ll go, inviting in a few minor complications to tilt the scales one way or another, but mostly depicting a wholly credible ambivalence. Both are solid options in their own ways, and picking one would no doubt harm the other. The film grows the teensiest bit repetitive as Joan agonizes over her options, but the stakes are high enough and the film’s imagination lively enough that we don’t mind a few delays. It’s also easy to forgive the film’s rather lax sense of rules; while the world-building could be more thorough, we also wouldn’t want Eternity bogged down in too many details.

Olsen plays Joan’s indecision with winsome fluster, at first breathy and trembling but eventually finding her resolve. Many jokes are made about Turner’s matinee-idol looks, and he graciously accepts the attention while successfully working to define Luke as an actual flawed human being (or former human being). Teller plays a good second-fiddle, gradually building the case for Larry’s unassuming appeal. The trio’s nimble performances are given sprightly support by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as consultants trying to guide their clients to the best possible hereafter. 

It’s all quite clever and sweet, even as a great current of sadness runs under just about every conversation in the film. Freyne does a lot with a modest budget, finding smart ways to show us fantastical things — memories playing out as if dioramas at the Natural History Museum, a vast expo hall filled with stalls advertising various paradises — on an economical scale. The film’s conclusions may be a tad trad and predictable (are marriage and family really all there is?), but there is also some value in its more abstract lessons — an urging to balance the practical and the irrational in matters of the heart, to approach life with a kind of ever-fluid understanding that all things are relative.

Maybe the most endearing aspect of the film, though, is that it exists at all. Are we truly, finally arriving in the promised land, where standalone, commercial works of wit and invention like this can exist again? The high-concept, broadly appealing movie with no franchise potential has long been an endangered species. And yet Eternity is one of several films that roughly fit that bill to premiere at Toronto this year. One dares to hope that Hollywood, for all its current ills, may finally be turning a corner, reverting back to when new ideas were held at a premium. Or I’ve simply died and this is the humble little great-beyond I’ve chosen for myself. Either way, it’s happy news.