Did someone order the straightest rom-com in human history? Because indie film production company A24 has your hot, steaming pile of heterosexuality ready for pickup. In Eternity, the latest movie from director David Freyne, even the gay stuff somehow makes everything more straight.

There is a little gay stuff, though probably not the gay stuff you were hoping for.

The story revolves around Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), a recently deceased woman tasked with deciding which of her two husbands to spend all of eternity with: Larry (Miles Teller), who she was married to for 60 odd years, or Luke (Callum Turner), her first husband who died young and who has been waiting 60 odd years for their reunion.

At a Q&A held earlier this month in New York, a panel moderator questioned the cast and director: "It feels so impossible, maybe they should just be a throuple?"

“We get that a LOT,” said Teller, laughing.

“Early on, it was a suggestion, and it was thrown down very quickly,” said Olsen, referring to a scene where, Joan, freshly dead and immediately confronted with the spectacle of two bro-ed out husbands jockeying for her affections, asks why she can’t just be with both of them. This earnest suggestion is greeted with aghast horror. 

“It just happened too early in the film,” continued Freyne cheerfully, as though the script of Eternity—which Freyne did a significant rewrite of, according to its screenwriter, Patrick Cunnane—were immutable, set in stone, and foretold since the dawn of time.

Maybe it was. Eternity is the first film directed by Freyne that he didn’t write himself, and it's a little baffling that this is the result. After all, Freyne does not have a conventional rom-com resume. His first film, The Cured (2017), was dark, extremely queer-coded horror about the political and social aftermath of the discovery of a cure for being a zombie.  

His second, Dating Amber (2020), was a semi-autobiographical story about two queer teens in 1990s rural Ireland who decide to fake date each other in an attempt to stop getting bullied. That film—originally called Beards—is a warm, funny, empathetic charmer, despite perpetuating the dangerous stereotype that the narrative purpose of a sensible lesbian is to care for a emotionally stunted twink. 

Left to right: John Early as Ryan and Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Anna both deserve to be in a better movie, but it's a relief to have them around to break up all the bickering. a24

Both movies mentioned above are better than Eternity—and that's too bad, because the film contains some real joys. Best among them is Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who plays Anna, Larry’s “afterlife coordinator.” Randolph is so embarrassingly good in every scene that more than once I wished that she were the star—especially since casting a Black woman as a white guy’s post-death concierge was a dubious move even when Whoopi Goldberg was hired to do it in Ghost. (One of Randolph’s first jobs after graduating from Yale School of Drama was, in fact, playing Goldberg’s role in Ghost: The Musical.)

By Freyne’s account, he really, really wanted to direct Eternity—he spent much of the pandemic watching Ernst Lubitsch films, and wrote his film school thesis on A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a darkly surreal film that is also easily the greatest film ever made about afterlife bureaucracy. 

As it is, Eternity is, at best, a film to watch only when other options have been exhausted. For example, it would be a good choice when you’ve already seen every other movie available on the in-flight entertainment menu.

There’s no fixing the most cardinal rom-com sin committed by the screenplay. In casually dismissing Joan’s proposed two-husband solution, without even giving it a chance to fail hilariously, Eternity takes away the central fantasy of the rom-com, which is a balance of powers.

This is not a witty, old-Hollywood face-off between three equally powerful characters, like Lubitsch's adaption of NoĂ«l Coward's Design for Living—this may sound familiar if you recently enjoyed a staging of it at Imago Theatre—which is itself based on the real-life friendship and possible love drama between Coward and the actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. This a fight between two guys, neither of whom is inclined to listen to the person they supposedly adore. That makes it, ultimately, neither romantic nor comedy. 

Eternity shows at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division, Wed Nov 19, 7 pm, SOLD OUT and in wide release Wed Nov 26, 114 minutes, rated PG-13.