Past Lives (2023) – What If Timing Was the Only Thing That Got in the Way

There are movies that fill the screen with sound and motion, and then there are the quiet ones — the kind that lean in gently, unfold slowly, and ask you to pay attention not to the volume, but to the silence. Past Lives is one of those films.

It begins with two kids in Seoul — Nora and Hae Sung — walking side by side like nothing in the world could ever split them apart. But the world does what it always does. Nora’s family emigrates, and just like that, Hae Sung becomes a part of a chapter she has to leave behind. No dramatic farewell. No promises made. Just a space where connection used to be.

What makes this story so intimate is how it lets time pass without rushing to fill the gaps. We meet Nora years later, now a writer in New York, fluent in both English and a version of herself that’s had to adjust. She is smart, composed, and settled — until Hae Sung finds her again. When they reconnect, it’s not an explosion. It’s a question. A soft one. What if?

Greta Lee plays Nora with such restraint and softness that you almost forget she’s acting. Her face doesn’t shout emotion — it holds it back, the way people do when they’ve learned to protect themselves. Most people know Greta from comedies, from her sharp, fast-talking roles in Russian Doll or Girls, or her voice work as Lyla in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. She’s always been vibrant, quick, and a bit unpredictable — the scene-stealer you can’t ignore. But Past Lives is a completely different stage, and here, she doesn’t steal the scene. She becomes it.

This role allows Greta to slow everything down. To hold a gaze for two seconds longer than comfort allows. To speak in two languages without translating her heart. To show what it feels like to live between cultures, between cities, between choices. This isn’t just a performance, it’s an arrival. The first time we truly get to sit with her in stillness and feel every layer of who she is.

Opposite her, Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung not as a symbol, but as a man still tied to a memory. He doesn’t come to New York to win her back. He comes to ask the question she’s been too busy to ask herself: what if we had never been separated? And that question lingers over every conversation, every walk, every moment they spend side by side again. It’s not romance in the traditional sense. It’s deeper than that. It’s emotional timing. And it’s not on their side.

What’s striking is that Past Lives never tries to resolve anything. Celine Song, in her directorial debut, doesn’t tell us what to feel, she shows us what it feels like. Her camera stays close to the characters but never invades. She captures the pauses, the near-glances, the emotional weight that lives in the unsaid. The story plays out like memory — quiet, unfinished, aching.

There is a Korean word the film circles around: inyeon — the idea that every encounter is tied to something from a past life. But the beauty here is that the film doesn’t present fate as something that guarantees love. It presents it as something that explains presence. Why someone enters your life again. Why the past walks beside you even as you build a future. And Past Lives doesn’t ask if Nora and Hae Sung should be together. It just asks if maybe they already were — in some other time, in some other way.

By the time the film ends, there’s no loud goodbye. Just a knowing. Just the understanding that even love has to obey time. That not every bond is meant to last forever, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

Greta Lee proves that she’s more than a scene-stealer. She’s a storyteller. She’s a presence. In Past Lives, she holds our attention not with words, but with everything she doesn’t say. And when the film ends, you realize that sometimes the most powerful kind of closure is simply letting go — not with resentment, but with love.

This film doesn’t try to change you. It just holds you still long enough for you to feel the parts of yourself you forgot were there. And maybe that’s what makes it unforgettable.