Heaven can wait: "Eternity"

If you find yourself onside with Eternity from an early stage, it's because this is a project all but engineered to trigger something positive in the cinephile lizard brain: an American movie making the kind of imaginative leap that American movies once made on a regular basis. (A sign of how far those movies have deviated from the path of righteousness over recent decades: this particular flight of fancy has had to be backed by the boutique studio A24, as if romantic endeavours were a marginal or niche concern.) Co-writer/director David Freyne (who did 2020's Dating Amber) has taken notes from Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life and the mighty A Matter of Life and Death in envisioning a vast limbo where the recently deceased, preserved in their happiest human form, are sent while they work out which eternity is the right one for them. These various afterlives are advertised like theme parks are to you and I: Capitalist World, Marxist World, Jewish World, Man-Free World, Smoker's World ("because cancer can't kill you twice"), possibly even World of Leather (for fans of either sofas or the 2025 motion picture Pillion) and the man-heavy World of Sport, presided over by benevolent deity Dickie Davies. You might want to choose quickly, given this supposed purgatory's resemblance to an airport terminal: hell on earth, in short, a place you long to escape at the earliest possible juncture. It is, however, a promising backdrop for a romcom, because these spectral commuters are obliged to make... well, not life-or-death choices, because that's a moot point up here, but choices nevertheless. They get more urgent still once Larry (Miles Teller) and his late, long-time wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) realise they're occupying the exact same astral plane as Joan's first love and husband Luke (Callum Turner). Decisions, decisions.

It's a movie with one big and very welcome surprise: how adept Teller is at playing the Cusacky underdog. Larry died as a cranky old man, which explains his wardrobe and weary demeanour, but Teller, liberated from a run of try-hard dramatic roles, makes him a charming contender for anyone's affections. It's both cosmically cruel and supremely funny that he should be notably shorter than his love rival, though I think we should say Larry's immediate verdict on Luke - "he looks like Montgomery Clift" - is some way wide of the mark. (Is this Larry also stuck with his older self's cataracts?) Turner actually looks, as so many of our male stars now do, like someone who got famous on an E4 show - and at least five years too young for the fully grown woman he's wooing. Spiritually, Luke is the younger man, his death in the Korean War cuing one of this script's best and cheekiest jokes, but Turner can't give the character any inner life - he's just tall - which makes the central choice easier and more predictable than perhaps we'd hoped. (Oddly, the Chris Evans of Materialists might have worked in this role.) It's a problem Freyne cannot solve. Whenever Teller is front and centre, we spy the abundant possibilities of a film like this; whenever Olsen's with Turner, you spot only the limitations of this particular film, a movie like they used to make, just not quite operating at its predecessors' level. The writing's not as sharp, the production design neither as imaginative nor as well-funded, the resolution laboriously arrived at rather than decisively and stirringly claimed. We get all the literature and trailers for those other worlds, but barely a glimpse of the real thing; when the characters enter a building called the Archives, they watch themselves acting out scenes from their pasts in front of painted backcloths. (It has the look of provincial dinner theatre, where the Fox or Warner Bros. version of Eternity would have resulted in something closer to cinema. Dare I suggest this isn't the kind of movie A24 should be making, whether because they don't quite have the money or because Celine Song used up all the money?) It'll do, as a functional date movie, a singleton's Friday-night wallow or down the line as a timekiller on a longhaul flight - and your attendance and attention may yet encourage the suits to make more of these with stronger material besides. But it's also further proof of the way American movies now routinely ask us to settle for the so-so, for minor, fleeting, short-term pleasures, where once creatives armed with a similar idea would have pushed for something truly worthy of Eternity as a title.

Eternity opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.