Knock on Wood

On the morning of a gender reveal party, grumpy grandfather Larry chokes on a pretzel and promptly wakes up on board a train heading into an undefined station. Surrounded by people of all ages, some of them in hospital garb, he shuffles into the terminal and tries to get someone to help him get back to his wife, Joan, who is dying of cancer. He then meets Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), his Afterlife Coordinator. Larry has died, which is why he now looks like Miles Teller – your representation in the afterlife is the moment in life you were at your happiest.

Anna tells Larry that the terminal at which he arrived is a layover area, where the deceased have one week’s time to decide which version of Eternity they would like to spend…eternity in. The options range as broadly as you could possibly imagine, from the exceedingly popular choice of a world without men, all the way to the world of clowns, discontinued for lack of interest. The only catch is, you can only make one choice. You’ll have to live with it for the rest of existence.

Just as Larry’s week to make his decision comes to a close, Joan passes away, and she finds herself looking like Elizabeth Olsen, bringing the deceased couple back together in their prime. But there’s a catch: Luke (Callum Turner), Joan’s first husband, who died fighting in the Korean War, has refused to choose an Eternity for 67 years to wait for her in the terminal. And so, a couple’s choice of how to spend the rest of forever together becomes Joan’s choice on who to spend the rest of forever together with.

What follows is a week of Joan being granted an exception; she’s allowed a week-long trial with each of her husbands in the Eternity of their choice, to help make her decision. Helping her with this is her own Afterlife Coordinator and Anna’s sworn enemy, Ryan (John Early).

Eternity puts a fantastical spin on the premise of movies like Past Lives, and asks roughly the same question. Do you place more value in the love built up over decades with all of its flaws and frustrations laid bare, or in the love that could have been and that you’ve carried memories and what-ifs of for that same amount of time?

Its main weapon in its arsenal is exactly that fantastical premise. Pitting Larry and Luke against each other with their lived experiences, and with Joan, is the kind of romantic rivalry you just can’t see anywhere else. Larry’s insistence on playing down the historical importance of the Korean War is such a specific jab that competing suitors in other movies could only dream of. The setting of this terminal, in which these characters can play with limitless possibilities, is fuel for so much comedy that both the script and these actors get so much juice out of it. While its premise is taken seriously by the characters, the way they play with the setting and the ridiculousness of the scenario make the film much lighter than its main conflict might otherwise allow for. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early add so much energy to the movie as these ACs who have been doing this job for such a long time that they’ve started making light of these sorts of situations long ago.

It has to be said, though – as funny as Eternity is, it doesn’t forget to properly engage with the drama at its core, and while I went into it with a solid idea of how it would end based on the premise, I was much less confident about my prediction as it went on. It does a great job of letting all three of these characters learn about themselves and others, and every turn the story took felt like it arose from the characters rather than simply satisfying the script. It might not be as heartbreaking as a straight drama like Past Lives, but it is wholly its own thing, and succeeds at what it wants to say with flying colors.

Eternity opens in limited theaters on November 14, and will release nationwide on November 26.