Past Lives (2023)
There are films that arrive quietly and somehow end up everywhere, and Past Lives was very much one of those. Released in 2023 through A24 in partnership with Killer Films, 2AM and South Korea's CJ ENM, Celine Song's feature debut landed at the Sundance Film Festival and proceeded to accumulate critical goodwill at a rate that left most first-time directors blinking in disbelief. It received two Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, a remarkable achievement for a film running just 106 minutes, shot on what was clearly a modest budget, and concerned almost entirely with three people talking across café tables and park benches. The film sits squarely at the intersection of two film cultures: it is as much a product of contemporary Korean-American experience as it is of the A24 brand of quietly prestigious drama, and that dual identity is woven into the premise itself. Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) were close friends as children in Seoul before Nora's family emigrated. Decades later, after a brief reconnection via social media, they meet in New York for a single weekend, each carrying the weight of the life they chose and the life they didn't. John Magaro plays Arthur, Nora's husband, a figure who might easily have been sidelined but who is handled with more care than that. For anyone interested in how Korean cinema and its diaspora has travelled outward in recent years, there is useful company to be found in Macca's reviews of Memories of Murder (2003) and The Handmaiden (2016), two films that locate Korean storytelling in very different registers.
Song wrote the screenplay herself, drawing on autobiographical experience in a way that gives the dialogue its particular texture: unhurried, precise, sometimes leaving the emotional weight in the gap between sentences rather than in the sentences themselves. The premise has obvious relatives in the romantic-realist tradition, and Song has been open about the influence of that lineage, though her film is culturally specific in ways that distinguish it from the generic longing-across-time picture. The production's blend of American independent financing and Korean co-production money also gave it a flexibility of location that a purely domestic film might not have managed.
The craft here is polished but restrained. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, who had previously shot Steve McQueen's Small Axe anthology, brings a similar patience to the frame: lots of held shots, faces in medium close-up allowed to simply exist without the camera cutting away the moment something might be felt. The palette is cool and urban for the New York sequences, and the images have the quality of memory slightly softened at the edges. The score, by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen (both of the band Grizzly Bear), does what the best film music does: it suggests an emotional temperature without spelling it out, built on sparse piano and strings that feel genuinely understated rather than merely quiet. Editor Keith Fraase cuts with considerable restraint, respecting the long takes Song clearly favoured on set and trusting the audience to sit inside scenes without rescue. The whole film has the feel of something carefully assembled by people who had collectively decided that less is more, and had the discipline to stick to it.
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it.
Celine Song's debut has been showered with praise, and at arm's length I can see exactly why: it is elegant, controlled, softly acted and unmistakably the work of a real film-maker.
It follows Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Seoul, parted by her family's emigration and then reunited, tentatively, across two decades and several time zones, a film about the roads we do not take and the pull of the life we might have led. And I found it, I am sorry to report, close to interminable.
My trouble is not the craft, which is near faultless, but the wavelength. This is precisely the sort of hushed, talky, yearning romance that sends a great many viewers into raptures and leaves me quietly checking how much time is left. I had the identical problem with Richard Linklater's Before films; I reviewed Before Sunset with much the same shrug, beloved and garlanded pictures that struck me as becalmed where everyone else finds them profound. The dialogue here is graceful but, to my ear, inert, the scenes exquisitely composed and yet endless, the story drifting toward a conclusion you can chart from the opening stretch.
It is not without rewards, even for a sceptic like me. The performances are lovely, the three leads underplaying with real delicacy, and the soundtrack is quietly gorgeous; I could have gone on listening to it long after the images had faded.
I take no pleasure in being the odd one out on this one. I wanted to be moved, and I half suspect the fault is as much mine as the film's. But a review has to be truthful about the experience I actually had, and mine was two hours of admiring something from the outside while gently willing it to end. So it can only be two stars from me, though if you love Past Lives as so many clearly do, do feel free to take my dissent with a hearty pinch of salt.
Past Lives is, by any conventional measure, a well-made film from a genuine talent, and the consensus around it is not the result of mass delusion. Song went on to direct further work, and the craft vocabulary she established here is one she clearly means to build on. Whether the film rewards its running time is, as the review above suggests, a more personal question than criticism sometimes likes to admit. There is an honest tradition of writing about films from the position of someone who recognises the achievement while remaining unmoved by it, which is a harder thing to do well than it sounds. For films that occupy a similar emotional territory of longing and connection across time and distance, Macca's review of Lost in Starlight (2025) and the quieter pleasures discussed in Tendaberry (2024) might offer points of comparison. Past Lives is the kind of film that will find exactly the audience it deserves, and that audience is considerably larger than one person's review. The rest of us can at least be grateful the score is so easy to listen to.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-08-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Past Lives (2023) on YouTube
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