As we return to the 1990s, with Scream, Clueless, Buffy, Practical Magic, Happy Gilmore and My Best Friend’s Wedding having either returned or set for it, there’s also a broader sense of nostalgia that’s seeing the resurrection of certain genres. Already at this year’s Toronto film festival, Aziz Ansari admirably tried, and I would say sadly failed, to recall the spirit of the high-concept star-led comedy with fantastical elements in Good Fortune. There’s a far more convincing attempt from the Irish writer-director David Freyne with Eternity, an ambitious afterlife romance that could more neatly play alongside films of the era like Heart and Souls, What Dreams May Come and Ghost.
It’s not just the thought-through ingenuity of the set-up but also the gloss and grandness of the film-making, an A24 production that feels like it should have the Touchstone Pictures logo at the start. It’s the surprising next step for Freyne whose endearing queer comedy Dating Amber got a little buried in the hellish summer of 2020. That film – about queer high schoolers faking a relationship to kill suspicion – was small and semi-autobiographical for Freyne, and for his follow-up he’s gone from rooted in truth to floating in fantasy.
