The difficult dilemmas don't end with death, as Eternity shows us

It's also provided plenty of artistic inspiration. Recently we've had The Good Place streaming on Netflix and there have been movies that examine various scenarios including A Matter of Life and Death and two different movies with the title Heaven Can Wait.

And now there's Eternity, written by Pat Cunnane and David Freyne and directed by the latter. The questions this ambitious romantic comedy-drama presents are not about what happens after death, but where do you want to spend eternity? And with whom?

Long-married elderly couple Larry and Joan bicker a lot but there's always an undercurrent of affection. They go to a family gender-reveal party where Larry chokes to death on a pretzel.

He wakes up in the body of his much younger self (Miles Teller) and is met by Anna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) his Afterlife Coordinator. She explains he's at the Hub, a waiting place where he must choose where he will spend the rest of time. There's certainly no shortage of possibilities, presented at stalls like a jobs fair, and the film evokes plenty of laughs and some thought as they are shown (often fleetingly and/or in the background: this could be a film to watch more than once). There's Beach World, Library World, Man-Free World (very popular, that one), and many more.

Once a selection is made, it's final: getting caught trying to escape results in banishment to the Void (not hell, it's carefully explained). You can wait for someone else to turn up and Larry elects to do so, since he knows Joan is terminally ill, and sure enough, she soon appears, young and beautiful (Elizabeth Olsen) with her Afterlife Coordinator, Ryan (John Early).

But so does somebody else. And that someone is Luke (Callum Turner), Joan's first husband, who died in the Korean War not long after they wed. And he's been waiting for her ever since.

Curiously, Luke doesn't seem to have his own AC, but things are complicated enough. The men's rivalry quickly emerges and they don't want to spend eternity together so it looks like Joan has a difficult decision to make. Does she want to remain with the man who was her husband for over 60 years and father to her children, or return to her first love, taken away so quickly?

The movie becomes more serious as it goes along: the emotional stakes are real and as the deadline for choice approaches it's hard not to hope Joan makes the right choice, whatever that might be.

Freyne's earlier work includes the very likeable movie Dating Amber, in which two queer teens - one male, one female - pretended to be a straight couple to survive high school. In Eternity, the heterosexual love triangle presents an even trickier situation, since the results of the decision will last for, well, eternity.

Paradoxically, the movie feels like it's too long and too short at the same time.

There's an ungainliness at times in the pacing and the way information comes out. And there's certainly no shortage of comic and dramatic possibilities. This could easily have been a short series, giving us more time to enjoy the various phases of the main story and how it develops as well as see more of what might happen to different people and in various lands.

People come to this afterlife at the age when they were happiest: there are a lot of children. An encounter with a boy on a beach doesn't play quite as poignantly at it might have but at least it doesn't become mawkish. Perhaps things are a little too dry-eyed at times, but maybe I'm just sentimental.

The three leads, while all solid actors, aren't top-tier A-list stars which might help the story; it's not a loaded Sleepless in Seattle scenario where Meg Ryan is obviously going to wind up with Tom Hanks instead of Bill Pullman. While the story is a fantasy, the dilemma is real and might lead to some soul searching.