“Eternity” (2025) is more psychological horror than rom-com.
The premise of this movie is unlike anything I have seen or heard of before, though its version of the afterlife is the stuff of nightmares. After all, the majority of the deceased there will never see their parents, kids, spouses or friends again because the rules forbid communication and the changing of the afterlives. Thus, unless everyone decides to live in a Norwegian prison cell and scrub floors for the foreseeable future, you’re saying goodbye to them for the rest of, well, forever.
Let’s say your parents are waiting for you so that you can all be together, and you’re waiting for your kids to arrive before you make an irreversible decision, because as lovely as the eternal void sounds, you’d probably rather be at the beach. If your kids live a nice, long life like you did, that means your parents are waiting two lifetimes to get the band back together. That doesn’t even take into account if your kids have kids whom they want to be with, and if those children have children. All of a sudden, you’re waiting on a great big family reunion and trying to wrangle everybody into an afterlife that they can all agree on. Again, there’s no traveling between afterlives or phones.
Fingers crossed that no one chooses an eternity that they want and goes there, hoping to pressure you all into coming with.
Then there’s the fact that they want you to decide on an eternity in a week, and all the eternities were designed by an evil genie.
Their eternities include gems like Hermit World, which might feel like a reprieve at first, but will eventually turn into solitary confinement, which is considered to be a form of torture, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In Infantilization Land, parents will be assigned to you. It might be nice at first not to have to cook, clean, worry about finances, be responsible for anything, but who’s to say that your parents will be any good? How long do you think being bossed around and not being allowed any agency over your life will be fun for? It sounds like a recipe for being a miserable teenager again, except this time you can’t exactly grow up and move out. They also advertised with baby formula and breast milk, so make of that what you will. You could always choose the Capitalist World, because our reality isn’t miserable or long enough.
Some seem kinda nice, like Your Lordship’s Eternity, which promises a life of aristocracy without the guilt of it being funded by slavery and colonialism. Although it seems to be set in some historic form of England, which was famously filthy and disease-ridden. I did not see anything guaranteeing toilets, running water, heating and cooling, electricity or even mosquito repellent, so there’s still room for things to be unpleasant. Studio 54 World promises an endless party without AIDs, though keep in mind that they are capable of feeling pain and exhaustion in the afterlife, so who knows if this will be like the Dancing plague of 1518 or just the endless migraine of all eternity. At least they’re offering cocaine. Musical World could potentially have the same issues as Studio 54 World, and there’s no guarantee that any of the people there will actually be able to sing.
Then there’s the existence of discontinued worlds and the fact that once a world fills up, they might not make another. So there’s a decent chance that your perfect eternity will be created after you make your permanent decision, will have filled up before you died or will fill up while you’re waiting centuries for your loved ones to all get together.
All in all, it’s a much gloomier afterlife than the atmosphere of the movie might initially let on, and I found it distressing to watch and think about.
But I think the film has important messages worth taking away. At least, what I understood is that we should enjoy the time we have with our loved ones, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll get to spend eternity together; what we have is this moment. Regardless of what your perfect eternity is, you need to spend your one chance on what is right for you.
Then there’s also the message that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) imparts near the end of the film: “Love isn’t just one happy moment… it’s a million… and it’s growing together, and looking after each other.”
Despite how much this movie stressed me out, it was also a lot of fun, beautifully made, thoughtful, profound and a million wonderful things that I am not eloquent enough to succinctly or properly express. But I am glad I watched it, even if it made me cry so much, I managed to mess up my waterproof mascara.
