There’s an old Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place To Visit”, in which a gangster entering the afterlife is initially delighted in getting everything he wants, believing he has gained access to heaven. It quickly becomes apparent to him that this is not heaven, and that an eternity of any kind would eventually become hell. Mārcis Lācis’ Touched By Eternity examines this idea from a slightly more lighthearted (but still weirder) perspective.
Fatso is obsessed with immortality. Holed up in his trailer, he spends his days watching YouTube videos on the idea and subscribing to whatever quack theories and remedies he comes across. One day, two…peculiar gentlemen show up at his doorstep and reveal they are vampires. Soon, Fatso embarks on the adventure of a long, long lifetime, and quickly finds out that maybe eternal life isn’t everything it’s cut out to be.
Somehow, despite having no punchlines and dealing with a very dark subject, this is a hilarious film. There’s something about the way Fatso (played by Andris Keiss) blandly and flatly interacts with the increasingly insane reality he has found himself in that is utterly hilarious. And when his new companions Egons and Carlos themselves find a new companion in the form of a tragically (but comedically) orphaned West Highland terrier, their fawning and adoration of it adds an additional element not just of unexpected sweetness but also head scratching absurdity. And it works. This movie starts out strange and just gets stranger, and not for a second does it feel flat or not wholly entertaining. Fatso’s immersion into the vampire lifestyle is somehow fantastic but humdrum, outlandish yet boring, and this constant paradox propels the film’s central thesis of ‘what if being immortal really, really sucked?’ to a blackly satisfying conclusion.
Touched By Eternity might come off as lazy or purposefully “low energy” but it’s undeniably charming in a hard to define way. There’s a ton of moments where you’ll ask yourself what the hell you’re watching, but it never feels like it’s trying to be shocking for the sake of being so. It’s just a movie that poses a rather intense philosophical concept and then answers it in the strangest possible way.
