Dir: David Freyne US, 2025, 114 mins
Cast: Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner
Review by Carol Allen
It’s set in an Afterlife that looks like a version of the Ideal Home exhibition with stands offering you choices for where you’re going to spend eternity – beach world, men free world (popular that one), a wide open spaces world, a gay world and so on. All tastes catered for. And indeed vying for your custom – just like on earth. More importantly though you have to choose with whom you’re going to spend that eternity. And you have just seven days to make up your mind. Not exactly a pearly gates and angels with harps setup but a lot more fun.
We first meet Larry and Joan as an elderly couple, played by Barry Primus and Betty Buckley, amiably bickering in their car. They’ve been married for 65 years but that is about to come to an end, when Larry unexpectedly chokes on a pretzel and drops dead. He finds himself on a train which spits him out at the Choose your Afterlife exhibition hall, where he’s greeted by his personal attorney Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and discovers the rather jolly fact that he has reverted to the age where he was at his best and so is now played by good looking Miles Teller. Anna explains the score and shows him to his luxury hotel room. But if he hasn’t made his choice, after seven days he will be transferred down to a modest apartment and a menial job in the basement until he chooses.
Larry however says he’s happy to wait for Joan. She’s dying from cancer, so shouldn’t be long in arriving. And bingo, so she does, now turned into her thirty something self, somewhat bewildered and played by Elizabeth Olsen. But before they can choose their eternity, up pops Joan’s youthful love Luke (Callum Turner). 67 years ago they were going to get married but he was in the army and killed in action – Vietnam perhaps? – and he’s been waiting all this time for her to join him.
And so we have the classic eternal triangle situation in a very unusual setting. Whom will she choose? The idealized love from her youth, whose inevitable downside she never had a chance to experience or the man she’s lived with for 65 years both for better and for worse?
Freyne has put a lot of thought and imagination into creating his story. As well as the initial set up there are other amusing ideas, like a sort of cinema where you can go and see important scenes from your life played out again. As a romantic comedy, there’s more romance than laughs, though the rivalry between the two men has its comic moments. And Da’Vine and Ryan (John Early) as Joan’s personal attorney have some sharp and witty exchanges as well.
The afterlife set up isn’t always totally consistent, if I’m going to be picky and the logic of the story’s resolution fails to totally convince. But the three lead actors are both charming and touching when required and overall this is a fun piece of cinema with a good heart.
