Commercially and critically successful, the film grossed $74 million worldwide at the box office on release while it won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Actress and it also went on grow its own cult following, with critics years after its release going on to consider it as one of the best films of the 2000s and one of the greatest romance films of all time.

One of 2004’s “Top 10 Films” as named by The American Film Institute.

Critically it was mainly praised for its plot, screenplay, direction, visual style, editing, musical score, themes and its performances specifically from Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet with A. O. Scott of The New York Times praising it for being “cerebral, formally and conceptually complicated, dense with literary allusions and as unabashedly romantic as any movie you’ll ever see” while Roger Ebert, who originally rated the film at 3½ stars out of 4 in 2004, also went on to refer to Charlie Kaufman in 2010 as “the most gifted screenwriter of the 2000s” and added it to his “Great Movies” list. Lastly, Time Out summed up their review saying that “the formidable Gondry/Kaufman/Carrey axis works marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one’s own addled mind, and in allegorising the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart”.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 92% with a critical consensus which reads “Propelled by Charlie Kaufman’s smart, imaginative script and Michel Gondry’s equally daring directorial touch, Eternal Sunshine is a twisty yet heartfelt look at relationships and heartache”.