The heaven that Irish director David Freyne depicts in his celestial new rom-com Eternity may actually be most people's idea of hell.
In this whimsical little gem, the pearly gates have been replaced by a bustling train station, where the dead arrive and are then decanted into a milling foyer where hawkers and salespeople try to flog them their own choice of eternity. It’s like a tourism Expo, meets Westworld, meets Funderland.
Thing is, the dead are only given one week to make their choice and once they choose, the recently deceased then have to spend their afterlife in their ideal eternity. If they skip out, they are thrown in The Void.
It is a wonderfully original idea and one full of endless - and I do mean endless - possibilities. Freyne, who previously impressed with Dating Amber and no-budget zombie flick The Cured, and his co-writer Pat Cunnane gleefully embrace this bureaucratic afterlife, like Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death with a good deal of screwball comedy smarts.
A droll opening sees birth and death meet in an elegant little arc. Elderly couple Larry (Miles Teller) and Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), who is dying of terminal cancer, attend a gender reveal party for their soon to arrive grandchild. Suddenly, Larry chokes on a mini pretzel and finds himself on the train to heaven, only now he has reverted back to a much younger version of himself.
Happily enough - for Miles anyway - Joan succumbs to her illness soon after and they are reunited. However, the course of true love never runs smooth - not even in heaven - and it turns out that Joan’s first love, Luke (Callum Turner), has been waiting for her in heaven for the past 67 years having died in less than heroic circumstances during the Korean war.
And so, we have a bizarre love triangle in heaven as the two men fight each other for a happily ever after with Joan and she is left utterly confused and conflicted. Freyne did very well with the cast: Teller is preppy, diffident and likeable, Turner plays the handsome lunk very well but Olsen can be a tad insipid.
It is full of quickfire dialogue and great sight gags that bring to mind Mel Brooks. Among the eternities on offer are Smoker’s World, and Man Free World and you will feel for the poor soul who laments "Why doesn’t anyone want to come to Library World?"
Freyne also does a very good job in making a small budget go a very long way in his vision of the afterlife. It loses some of its vim and juice in the third act but Eternity is the kind of movie that deserves repeat viewing to catch and savour those gags and ponder those philosophical and metaphysical questions. This is very smart film making.
