Happily Ever Afterlife
Directed by David Freyne
Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner
Released November 26th, 2025
Rated PG-13
The concept of spending the afterlife with your loved ones is a pleasant one, until you spend any time at all thinking about the particulars of how exactly that would work. Would you and your loved ones retain your corporeal forms? Would your pets be there, jumping and playing along with you in a picturesque field? Would your pets get along with each other in the afterlife, even if they didn’t during your life? Let’s leave pets behind and ask the same question in regard to your friends and family. Would you spend eternity with your parents? With your grandparents? With neighbors, friends, past loves and present entanglements? What would they have to say about all of this? Would all of you get along better than you did when you were all alive? Would all of these people consider it a state of bliss to spend their eternities with you? What if you wanted to spend your afterlife with someone, but they had other ideas of how they want to spend eternity? Being reunited with loved ones for all eternity sounds like a nice idea, but I for one feel like there’s way too much paperwork involved.
After choking to death on a pretzel, an elderly man named Larry (Miles Teller) finds himself in a state between life and the next plain of existence. Before he can move on to eternity, he has the opportunity to choose which afterlife appeals the most to him. This is explained to him by Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) his Afterlife Coordinator, or “A.C.” She gives him brochures extolling the virtues of Beach World, Ski World, Studio 54 World, 1930’s Berlin World (now with 100% Less Nazis!), and so on. Everyone gets seven days to choose, but once you do, you cannot change your fate. No takesies-backsies. Larry figures he will spend eternity with Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), his wife of sixty-some years. She is, after all, on her deathbed and should be joining him shortly.
While he is waiting, he meets Luke (Callum Turner), a handsome bartender who lives in this in-between world. Luke hasn’t chosen an afterlife for himself yet, as he is also waiting on a loved one to join him in death. He’s been waiting many, many decades for her to die. While Larry waits, he looks at brochures and tries to pick out the perfect place for himself and Joan to spend their existence in perpetuity. Soon Joan passes away, and she is reunited not just with Larry, but with Luke, who turns out to be her first husband who was killed during the Korean war. Joan is given her own A.C., Ryan (John Early), who explains that she must choose her afterlife within seven days, and with whom she wants to spend it, since Larry and Luke demand that she choose between them. The film posits that the form you take in the afterlife is the age at which you were the happiest, which is why we have an elderly couple played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen. As you can tell from the set-up, the film’s vision of the afterlife is one of tightly regimented bureaucracy, not unlike the take-a-number waiting room purgatory in Beetlejuice. Like that film, there are plenty of laughs to be found here
Miles Teller brings an aw-shucks demeanor to Larry, a guy who complains a lot but enjoys doing the complaining. The accent that Elizabeth Olsen decides to use for Joan takes a few scenes to get used to, but it’s nice once again seeing her flex her acting chops outside of comic book movies. She really is a talented actress. Teller and Olsen have a nice dynamic, effortlessly bickering with one another as if they have been married for 65 years. Callum Turner’s deceased hot veteran Luke isn’t the most fleshed out character, but he is certainly easy on the eyes, something that every character brings up every chance they get, to great comedic effect.
We spend time with Larry and Luke, but I think this is Joan’s story, and we get to see her struggle with a decision that doesn’t seem to have any good solution. Some viewers may be upset about the outcome, but that only goes to show how the movie succeeds in making one invest in the characters and their everlasting fates. I mentioned the laughs, and the film has plenty of them, but it also manages to hit you right in the feels. It’s impossible to watch the film and not wonder with whom you would spend your afterlife. It gets a bit scary when you wonder if anyone would choose to spend theirs with you! As emotional as the film gets, David Fleming’s capable score never veers into schmaltz.
If you’ve recently experienced personal tragedy in the form of a loved one passing away, it may be understandably tough to connect with Eternity’s whimsical view of the afterworld. But in the end its depiction of loved ones reuniting may provide comfort to those of us still toiling away on this mortal coil. Directed by David Freyne, who shares a writing credit on Pat Cunnane’s original script, Eternity is something of a modern rarity. It isn’t a remake, prequel, sequel, nor is it based on an existing intellectual property. What a kick it is to see an original movie for grownups in a movie theater. I felt like it was the good old days. It made me want to return to the multiplex the next day, to see what else was playing. And the day after that. And the day after that. I guess that’s the afterlife I would choose: Movie World.