Eternity

Monday, September 8: This screening will be presented with open captions. Live captioning will be provided for the live onstage components.

Out of everyone you have ever loved, who should be your partner in the hereafter? This is the question at the core of this transporting fantasy dramedy from director David Freyne (TIFF ’17’s The Cured), starring Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, and Miles Teller as souls in transit tangled in a troubled love triangle.

Following decades of marriage, elderly couple Joan (Olsen) and Larry (Teller) die within a week of each other. That means they needn’t wait long to reunite in the afterlife, a way station where every soul has one week to decide who to spend the rest of eternity with. (Here, everyone reverts to the appearance and age of their happiest moment, hence the young cast.)

For Joan and Larry, the answer would seem to be straightforward. Enter Luke (Turner), Joan’s first husband, who died in the Korean War and has been waiting 67 years to have his one-and-only back in his arms. Does Joan choose to revive the passionate love of her youth? Or does she stick with the time-tested fortitude of her second marriage?

An ingeniously original contribution to the afterlife-as-bureaucracy subgenre fostered in films like Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, Eternity is, at heart, about the dilemmas we all face surrounding desire and devotion. Olsen, Turner, and Teller each offer playful, heartfelt performances, immersing us in a milieu that is at once fanciful and somehow familiar.