Film Review: Past Lives 從前的我們 (2023) - USA
Tagline: A Masterpiece of the Heart’s Quiet Arithmetic
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
Rating: ★★★★★ 10/10
Full Review:
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Review Count - 74
Support my goal of writing one film review per day in 2025 - https://www.patreon.com/neofilmreviews
Some films are felt before they are understood. Celine Song’s “Past Lives” is one of those films. It arrives not with the clamor of a blockbuster or the prickly ambiguity of an art-house puzzle, but with the profound, quiet weight of a truth you’ve always known but have never found the words to express. It is a story about love, yes, but not in the way we usually see it. It is about the love that exists in the spaces between people, in the lives not lived, and in the silent, parallel world of “what if.” This is a perfect film.
The story is deceptively simple, unfolding over 24 years in three acts. We meet Na Young and Hae Sung as twelve-year-olds in Seoul, two bright students whose childish competitive spark is unmistakably the first flicker of a deep connection. But before it can catch flame, Na Young’s family emigrates to Canada, and she becomes Nora. The first act is a masterclass in showing, not telling, the ache of absence through the nascent technology of early video chat—a pixelated window into a life left behind.
The film then leaps forward twelve years. Nora (a luminous Greta Lee) is a playwright in New York, found at a writers' retreat by the now-adult Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who has been searching for her. Their reconnection over Skype is a torrent of unspoken history, a dance of smiles and pauses that says more than any page of dialogue could. They are two people reaching across an ocean and a decade, trying to bridge the chasm of their diverging paths. Yet life, in its stubborn way, intervenes again. They are not ready.
Another twelve-year leap brings us to the film’s breathtaking final act. Hae Sung finally comes to New York to meet Nora, who is now married to Arthur (a wonderfully kind and perceptive John Magaro). What follows is not a tawdry thriller of infidelity, but one of the most honest and emotionally sophisticated portraits of adult relationships I have ever seen. The film’s genius lies in its triangulation. Arthur is not an obstacle; he is a witness, a participant in his own right, who understands he is marrying not just a woman, but her entire history—a history that has a face and a name.
The heart of the film, and its quiet revolution, is the Korean concept of “In-Yun”, the idea that fateful connections are built over thousands of lifetimes of encounters. It is the framework through which Nora, Hae Sung, and even Arthur must view this profound, perplexing reunion. Are they merely old friends? Or are they souls who have met before, working through the layers of their “In-Yun” in this lifetime? The film doesn’t provide easy answers. It simply asks us to sit with the beautiful, painful complexity of it all.
Celine Song’s direction is astonishingly assured for a debut. She possesses a rare patience, holding shots on faces that contain multitudes of feeling. She trusts her actors, and she trusts us. The performances are a miracle of subtlety. Greta Lee speaks volumes with a glance, her eyes reflecting the two women she has become: the ambitious Nora of the West and the Na Young of her origins. Teo Yoo embodies a beautiful, melancholic stillness, a man haunted not by a ghost, but by a very real person. And John Magaro, as the husband who loves his wife enough to fear what he might be keeping her from, is the film’s heartbreaking anchor in the present.
“Past Lives” is not about choosing one life over another. It is about the impossible math of the heart, the understanding that to gain one beautiful future is to lose another. It is about the person you might have been, and the person you became, finally meeting for a drink and finding there are no regrets, only a deep, resonant sorrow for the beautiful, untaken path.
This is a film of breathtaking grace, intelligence, and emotional power. It does not seek to manipulate tears but to earn them through sheer human truth. In a single, devastating final shot on a sidewalk, it captures a universe of love, loss, and fate. It is a film that will leave you speechless, and then desperate to talk to the person you love most about the lives you’ve lived, together and apart. This is what cinema is for. (Neo 2025)