A24 Rom-Com Eternity Might Just Settle Titanic’s Ending Dilemma

Filmmaker David Freyne has thought a lot about the afterlife. Who hasn’t? After all, even a self-described quasi-atheist—“I’m kind of hedging my bets,” he smiles—is only human. But Freyne is also the co-writer and sole director of Eternity, which has given him additional insight into the big questions, all while crafting a surprisingly sweet and fairly intimate romantic comedy. It’s lighter on its feet than that name suggests too.

“It’s definitely an intriguing title,” the Irish storyteller muses when we sit down with him on an overcast day in New York City. He confides the moniker was maybe a tad imposing when the first draft of the screenplay by Patrick Cuanne was sent to him by his agent. Yet the hook of the film wasn’t (only) the chance to imagine the afterlife onscreen, but also an opportunity to explore the explosive idea of having more than one love of your life waiting for you on the other side.

“I was just immediately engrossed by the premise specifically, this woman having to choose between first love and last love,” Freyne recalls. “Even though the film is set in post-death, it’s all about life. It’s about what it is to exist.” Which, whether we like it or not, often comes down to the choices you make.

The biggest choice in question for Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), a 90-something woman who recently passed on and reclaimed her youthful appearance, is between that of the long-lost husband she finds waiting for her on the other side—military hero and Korean War casualty Luke (Callum Turner)—and the second husband she spent an entire lifetime with: Larry (Miles Teller). Larry is our true POV character, as we follow his journey first into an afterlife that is less pearly white gates than it is a bougie train station still operating like it’s Cannes 1962. Poor Larry wound up here after choking on a pretzel at a party for his next great-grandchild. But he knows his terminally ill wife will soon be right behind him in entering a “next stage” where the recently deceased are asked to pick boutique “eternities” to spend the rest of their existence in.

What he doesn’t count on, however, is Joan’s first husband also being there.

It’s a classic high-concept love triangle, and one which might serve as a kind of sequel to Titanic’s storybook ending where Kate Winslet’s Rose famously fled to an afterlife aboard the RMS Titanic where she was reunited with a guy she knew for a few days (Leonardo DiCaprio) after being married to another man for a lifetime.

“I’m really hoping I don’t get sued by James Cameron,” Freyne chuckles when we note the similarities. “But that is the question: is she going to go with Jack or is she going to stay with her husband of how ever many years? I think most of us, unless maybe a lucky few, have more than one love in our lives at different points.”

According to the central star of his film, the beauty of Eternity is there are no easy answers between Joan choosing between the one who got away and the one she’s known for what feels like forever.

“[We were] hoping to show all the different types of loves there are,” says Olsen, while pointing to some of the side characters in the film. “[There] is a form of self-love, and there’s another [couple] which could be a more complicated version of a love. But I do know that David really wanted to tell a story about how many ways love can be experienced.”

Indeed, one of the most significant changes Freyne made to the film during his own rewrites of the screenplay was emphasizing the impossibility of Joan’s choice. While he never changed the ending Cuanne created, Freyne was eager to make this as much a film about a chance to switch proverbial sliding doors.

“It was really important to me that there is no right or wrong choice for Joan,” says Freyne. “I think even though the end of this film feels right to me, she could have chosen a different path and that would feel right too… it’s really vital that you can be Team Larry or you can be Team Luke, but we are always Team Joan.”

In this way, the rom-com with its wild high-concept, but gentler disposition, resembles the laughers of Hollywood’s Golden Age that Joan and Luke might have enjoyed before he was shipped to Korea.

“Preston Sturgis is a genius, and Billy Wilder is my hero,” Freyne enthuses when we note tonal similarities to movies like Sullivan’s Travels and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. “Even [Ernst] Lubitsch with Heaven Can Wait. I always aspire to make a film in the spirit of that Golden Age. I think that’s when rom-coms were their best. I think that’s when they won Oscars, that’s when they dealt with really heavy topics, but with a lightness of touch.”

He also encouraged his stars to seek out that cinema while finding their characters.

Says Callum Turner, “What I wanted to do with Luke was [show] that he is at an age where he doesn’t yet know who he is. He’s not become a man. So he has an idea of what a man is, and these matinee idols like Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, those were his north stars of what he wanted to present and who he wanted to be. And he’s stuck in a world for 67 years where you can’t evolve. What does that do to someone? That was really my thing to play with.”

Developing that world also became Freyne’s north star for Eternity’s heightened charm offensive.

“We really spent a long time wanting to create somewhere that felt bureaucratic,” Freyne says. “It felt like it had these rules and boredom and tedium to it… It’s very vibrant and exciting but it’s an artificial world, and I think we see particularly through Callum’s character that it’s a weird stasis to stay in for a long time.” Still the director thinks it is supposed to be initially beguiling as a way station. The filmmaker even takes mild offense when we suggest the brutalist architecture could be its own form of hell.

“That’s actually my idea of heaven!” Freyne insists. “I love brutalist architecture, and if I could live in the Barbican or the National Theatre in London, I’d be very happy. I also love the idea that this was a place that was redesigned recently. But for the afterlife, that was the ‘60s when that architecture was kind of the idea of utopia almost.”

Another core aspect of the film is designing what individual “eternities” that souls are forced to choose between. Some are basic, such as a “Mountains” eternity that Luke favors, and which looks suspiciously like British Columbia. Meanwhile Larry prefers an overcrowded “Beach” eternity. Yet some are incredibly specific, be it a “No Men Ever” eternity or a “Capitalist” one where you can spend eons looking down at the poor from a Manhattan high-rise. “Some people do think there’s no point of being rich if somebody else isn’t poor,” the director observes.

One of his favorites though was also among the first things he shot for the afterlife: a 1980s-style infomercial called the “Weimar Germany But With No Nazis!” eternity.

“That was mine,” the director admits. “I think that was one of the first ones I wrote, and that probably is my favorite. And actually shooting those ads, those kind of infomercials, it was the very first thing we shot and it was probably the funnest day. It really set the tone for the whole shoot.” In fact, he is eager to revive such commercials’ visual language. “We shot those on DigiBeta, and I’m going to be the Chris Nolan of DigiBetas. I want to bring it back. I want to shoot an entire feature on DigiBeta!”

Nonetheless, the hope is that as funny as the movie can be, it also triggers something in viewers.

“I think what’s been amazing in screening this film is how much people have reflected on their own lives after watching it, and to discuss their spouses or how much they mean to them or talked about a past relationship,” Freyne considers. “We’re all human, we all occasionally question what if we had chosen something else?”

Sometimes you get a second chance to find out—whether you like it or not, Joan.

Eternity is in theaters on Wednesday, Nov. 24.