Some films build a third-act crescendo. Past Lives builds a third-act silence, and it might be the most affecting silence in any film of 2023.
Celine Song’s directorial debut tells a simple story across 24 years and two continents: two childhood friends in Seoul are separated when one emigrates, reconnect online a decade later, and finally meet in person another twelve years on, when one of them is married and the other isn’t. There is no twist. There is no villain. Almost nothing dramatic happens, in the usual sense. The film’s entire engine is the negative space between three people sitting in a New York bar, knowing exactly what they are not going to do, and being kind about it.
Greta Lee gives one of the year’s quietest, most precise performances as Nora — a playwright who has long since chosen her American life and is forced, by the arrival of an old friend, to look at the woman she is no longer. Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung carries an entire continent’s worth of longing in the way he holds his shoulders. John Magaro, as Nora’s husband, has the trickiest job — playing the man who has to be neither obstacle nor villain — and he is heartbreakingly generous in it.
Song’s script is interested in inyeon, the Korean Buddhist idea that two people brushing past each other on a street are doing so because of some thin thread of past-life connection. It sounds like a writerly conceit until the film lets it become the structural skeleton. Every meeting between Nora and Hae Sung is also, the film insists, a near miss with some other version of their shared life. By the final scene, that idea has stopped being theoretical and become unbearable.
What surprised me most is how visually composed a first feature this is. Song shoots New York and Seoul with similar palettes — washed greens, soft warm streetlights — so that the two cities feel less like opposites than like two faces of the same room. The frames hold a second longer than you expect. People are allowed to think on camera.
The Verdict
Past Lives is a small film with the gravity of a much larger one. It will leave you wanting to text someone you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years. Resist, or don’t.
Rating: 9/10