Past Lives

There is a concept in Korean called in-yeon — the idea that connections between people across lifetimes accumulate, that meeting someone is never accidental, that strangers who brush past each other in a crowd have been building toward that moment through thousands of years of prior lives. Celine Song’s debut film uses this idea not romantically but with something harder: as a way of measuring what we lose when we leave.

Nora (Greta Lee) left Seoul for Toronto with her family at age twelve. Her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) stayed. They reconnect on social media twelve years later, talk over Skype for months, and then — in a decision the film treats as both inevitable and a small death — Nora ends the calls because she has ambitions and a life to build and the connection is becoming something she cannot afford. Another twelve years later, Hae Sung comes to New York to visit. Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a writer she met at an artists’ residency.

The Architecture of Longing

Song structures Past Lives in three movements across twenty-four years, and the film’s discipline is in what it refuses to dramatise. There are no confrontations. There are no revelations. There is no affair. Instead there are conversations: careful, adult, alive to what cannot be said directly. When Hae Sung and Nora walk through New York at night, the camera keeps its distance, watching them talk from across the street, as if aware that proximity would distort what is happening between them.

Greta Lee gives one of the performances of the decade. Nora is a woman who has built herself into something through effort and decision — she speaks English with the practiced fluency of someone who had to earn it, she is warm and competent and slightly armoured — and Lee plays all of this at once. In the final scene of the film, when Nora says goodbye to Hae Sung in the street outside her building and goes inside and weeps and then stops weeping because Arthur is there and asks if she is okay, the whole weight of the film lands in about ninety seconds. I have seen this film three times and the ending gets harder each time.

“What Song is examining is not whether Nora made the right choice — the film is too honest for that framing — but what choosing costs and what it means to carry the unchosen life alongside the lived one.”

Arthur and the Third Point

John Magaro’s performance as Arthur is the film’s most undervalued element. He is present without being intrusive, generous without being saintly. There is a late-night scene where Arthur, alone with Hae Sung while Nora sleeps, talks to him in halting attempts — Arthur doesn’t speak Korean, Hae Sung barely speaks English — and the scene is funny and tender and quietly anguished. Arthur knows what he has, and knows its limits, and he loves Nora with full knowledge of both.

Past Lives is, in the end, a film about immigration as much as it is about love — about the specific grief of becoming someone new in a new country, and what that becoming requires you to leave behind. Song, who immigrated from Korea herself and whose own life appears to have informed the material, handles this with the precision of lived knowledge. There is nothing sentimental about it. There is everything true.