Past Lives

Two people who were close as children in Seoul find each other again as adults in New York, after years apart spent becoming different versions of themselves. Celine Song structures the film around the gap between those two moments — what happens in the middle is handled elliptically, with the film more interested in what accumulates across distance than in dramatizing the distance itself.

The result is a romance built on restraint: Greta Lee and Teo Yoo play two people whose fluency with each other has outlasted the circumstances that produced it, and John Magaro's presence as Nora's husband quietly pressurizes every scene without tilting toward melodrama. The film works by what it withholds from each of its three characters at once.