Eternity (2025)

Plot of Eternity. Larry and Joan are an elderly bickering couple, with Joan actually suffering from terminal cancer. At a family gathering Larry chokes to death on a pretzel and ends up in ‘the hub’ the waiting area for eternity, being guided by his afterlife coordinator, Anna. All the newly arrived souls are manifested as the physical bodies when they are happiest. The rules are that the recently deceased spend a week in the luxurious accommodation of the hub, while deciding with whom, and where, to spend eternity, but if you try to get back to the hub from your chosen reality you are sent to ‘the void’. There are multiple stalls offering eternities of your choice and a bar where Larry can get a drink. He is waiting for Joan and is relegated to more humble accommodation as time passes. When Joan arrives he is overjoyed to see her youthful self, but also waiting is her first husband Luke, who had been killed in the Korean War, and who had waited for 67 years as barman at the hub.  So, who will Joan choose?

Content: Just a bit of decorously presented sex. Quite a lot of drinking and at one point a drunken evening for Luke and Larry. The machinations of the afterlife interestingly presented, involving arriving at the hub in a train, and departing for the eternity of your choice in a train. And the hub itself something like a railway station concourse surrounded by towering accommodation blocks, which contain the well appointed bedrooms. There is a lot of interaction between Larry’s coordinator and Joan’s coordinator and endless discussion between Larry and Luke as Joan vacillates as to who she should spend eternity with. There are occasional pitches by promoters of different eternities with humorous content.

A View: We don’t often try romantic comedies at the cinema, but there was not much else on this week. In fact there is a proliferation of Spanish films at cinemas in Madrid at the moment pushing out the foreign language offerings. So we were two of only four in our screen in town, at the very moderately promoted Eternity.  It was ‘fine’ as Penny would say. And on the plus side, not too long. If anything it started off with a quite good idea, but began to fall to pieces towards the end as it started to break its own rules. But don’t they all.

Fun Fact: I am always interested in the cars chosen to ‘act’ in films. This time right on the nail. Old Larry and Joan drive an ancient Volvo estate.