.png)
“You have to choose one.” So states the logline on the poster of Eternity, David Freyne's new A24 rom-com. It is, on one hand, referring to the premise of the film: everyone must choose one world in which to spend eternity after their death. But, as we can all tell from the poster, it's really referring to Elizabeth Olsen's choice between Miles Teller and Callum Turner. This film is very proud to be all about the love triangle.
Olsen plays Joan, a woman who has passed away only to find her first and second husband vying for her affections in the afterlife. And, yes, she has to choose one – polyamory still won't work for these three, even with a literal eternity's worth of time. Which is fair enough. Luke (Turner), her first husband, died in “the war” (the Korean War, it turns out) and has been hanging around in the afterlife waiting area for 65 years for Joan to die. Larry (Teller) her second husband, died just a week before her after choking on a pretzel. And, yes, much to her annoyance, he's still munching on them in the afterlife. While Luke represents a perfect fantasy – the passionate, all-consuming love that was cut short – Larry represents tired familiarity and quiet, cosy companionship. And Joan has to choose one.
'This film allows us to really understand what a privilege it is to get to grow old at all.'
This whole set-up feels like familiar territory for the millennial viewers that this film is undoubtedly targeting. After all, although the love triangle trope has been around since the dawn of the romance, it had a real hey day in the early aughts. Darcy and Daniel in Bridget Jones' Diary. Peeta and Gale in The Hunger Games. Edward and Jacob in Twilight. Stefan and Damon in The Vampire Diaries. Millennials were practically raised on the love triangle.
Perhaps that's part of the reason why women in their 30s and 40s are turning so readily to a new batch of love triangle fare. We flocked to the cinema for Celine Song's Materialists, in which Dakota Johnson hummed and hawed over Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. We devoured last year's Challengers, which saw Zendaya caught in a triangle with Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist. We even seem to have commandeered the love triangles seemingly intended for teens in The Summer I Turned Pretty and Stranger Things.
The love triangle is so back – and we seem to be right there with it. But what is it about the love triangle that has us in such a choke hold? Is it merely the nostalgia of seeing a trope from our tween years play out on screens again? Or is there something deeper going on?
According to psychologist Dr Candice O’Neil, it has to do with working through our own complicated feelings about love. A love triangle, she says, “allows us to explore emotional tension from a safe distance." It "reflects our own fears about love and belonging” right back at us without being too confronting or dangerous.
"This isn’t a love story, it’s an odyssey of villainy."
And those fears aren't always just about who we should be with – they can also be about who we want to be in ourselves. Back in 2020, Joaquim Trier's The Worst Person in the World captured the attention of millennial women thanks to its love triangle. It saw one woman breaking up a relationship with a stable, older artist after a one night fling with a stranger. But the film was less about her relationships with the two men than her relationship with herself – in each relationship, she tried on different personalities for herself like she was trying on clothes. She tried out different futures. And that idea of being unsure of who we actually want to be rings very true to our generation – and the love triangle trope is a great way to let those anxieties play out.
“Modern love triangles offer emotional realism and complexity,” explains O'Neil. “They reflect contemporary questions about identity and personal values which makes the relationships feel more meaningful and more relevant to our lives.”
In Materialists, Johnson's Lucy finds herself torn between a man she likes who offers a like of comfort and wealth, and a man she loves, who offers a life of financial struggle. A big part of her decision between the two love interests is being honest with herself about who she wants to be. Similarly, in Wicked, Jonathan Bailey's Fiyero finds himself pulled in opposite directions – towards Glinda and a life of easy, amoral comfort, or towards Elphaba, and an uncertain life fighting for good.
Please give the yearning a rest, once and for all.
And a lot of us have found ourselves wrestling with similar dilemmas – even if they don't play out in quite such dramatic love triangles.
“Seeing characters wrestle with choice and consequence helps us recognise our own patterns," she says. “It encourages reflection on what we truly want in a partner. Observing conflicts outside our personal world gives perspective.”
After all, deciding who we want to be and who we want to be with is something we can all relate to.
