Past Lives

When Celine Song set out to make Past Lives, she wasn’t trying to invent a sweeping romance. She was trying to understand a moment from her own life - a moment so quietly surreal that it felt cinematic even as it was happening. Years before her film debut, Song found herself sitting in a New York bar with two men: her American husband on one side and, on the other, the childhood sweetheart she had left behind when her family emigrated from South Korea. Between the three of them, a whole universe seemed to open - not dramatic or explosive, but tender, awkward, and charged with the unspoken weight of “what if?”

That night became the seed of Past Lives, a film that unfolds across 24 years and three countries, following Nora (born Na Young) and Hae Sung, childhood friends parted by immigration and reunited decades later. But the story isn’t just about romance. It is about identity, time, and the strange melancholy of leaving one life behind to build another.

At the core of Song’s film lies the Korean concept of inyeon - the idea that certain relationships are fated, shaped by encounters stretching across past lives. Nora explains that even two strangers brushing sleeves on the street might be bound by thousands of such connections. Past Lives uses this belief not as a supernatural device, but as a philosophical lens: a way of understanding why some relationships linger in the heart long after circumstances pull them apart. It suggests that the people who matter to us are not accidents; they are echoes.

Song’s own immigrant journey shapes the emotional architecture of the film. Like Nora, she moved from Seoul to North America as a child, and the shift in language and identity created a fault line between the girl she had been and the woman she became. The film captures that tension with remarkable restraint. Nora is successful, creative, and rooted in her marriage - yet she is also haunted by a version of herself that still exists in another country, in another language, in another person’s memory.

Unlike a typical love triangle, Past Lives resists melodrama. Instead, Song favors quiet expressions: long pauses, sidelong glances, the gentle ache of unsaid words. The film’s power lies in what it refuses to simplify. There is no villain, no betrayal - only three people trying to honor the truth of who they are while acknowledging the paths they did not take. The emotional climax lands not in grand declarations but in acceptance: love can be real and meaningful even when it doesn’t lead to a shared future.

What makes Past Lives resonate so widely is its honesty. Anyone who has moved away, grown up, or reinvented themselves understands the film’s central question: How many versions of ourselves have we left behind - and who remembers them? Song’s answer is neither cynical nor sentimental. She suggests that we are shaped by these past lives, whether literal or metaphorical, and by the people who loved us in them.

In the end, Past Lives is less about choosing between two loves and more about recognizing that life is a collection of intertwined stories. Some chapters close. Some remain open in our imaginations. And some - the rare, inyeon-woven ones - continue to echo through time, reminding us that even the lives we didn’t live still belong to us in some quiet, unforgettable way.