Movie releases. "Eternal": a love story overwhelmed by ambition and symbolism

An oceanic fault line that needs to be plugged to prevent the world from collapsing. A scientist plunges into the abyss, while the surface crumbles—well, feelings, especially! Eternal , the second feature film by Danish director Ulaa Salim, looks from afar like a tale of climate change anticipation—that now-codified subgenre of contemporary science fiction that, in the face of ecological urgency, seeks a fable for the present, unhinged and anxiety-inducing.

But the fault, an underwater geological wound, is approached from the perspective of its literal, thick symbol. The visual signifier—a dark, humid, penetrable terrestrial crevasse—is charged with a meaning more psychoanalytic than ecological: separation, lack, the feminine, sexuality. The film then slides from a geophysical space to a mental territory, to the point of engulfment.

This is the translation of the climatic apocalypse into the weighted emotional abyss. This imagery oversignifies: the terrestrial gap becomes almost uterine, the matrix of the world that unravels like this decomposed couple. Ulaa Salim, instead of creating a metaphysical tension, drowns in the symbolism of the fault of the underwater depths. The main character, by plunging into it, does not seek so much to save the world as to confront himself, a broken relationship, a liquefied emotional memory.

With its promising beginnings, we had hoped for a film that would mix genres and registers to better question the era. But science fiction here is merely the backdrop, a pure pretext for an indolent and vague love drama, floating in indecision. And the staging, weighed down by effects, sometimes seems to watch itself fall into weightlessness.

Eternal by Ulaa Salim, in theaters this Wednesday, July 30. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.