Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song makes an unforgettable entrance onto the filmmaking scene with a romantic drama about identity and human connection, culled from aspects of her own history. It’s a haunting film that sweeps you up in its exquisitely relayed emotional storm, transcending rom-dram cliches by adopting an intricate and unpredictable approach. 
As proceedings open, things aren’t remotely what they seem. We find ourselves in a smart New York bar in the small hours, listening in on the conversation of an unseen couple. They’re observing the film’s central trio from afar and speculating about them, based purely on their body language. ‘Who do you think they are to each other?’ one of them asks. What follows attempts to unpick this apparently simple question.

The pieces of this puzzle are playwright Nora (Russian Doll’s Greta Lee), her childhood friend from South Korea, Hae-sung (Teo Yoo from Decision To Leave), and Nora’s American husband, Arthur (First Cow’s John Magaro). Before we return to the bar armed with more information about the evening in question, Song’s film rolls back 24 years to fill in some blanks about Nora and Hae-sung’s story. Back in Seoul, Hae-sung was Nora’s schoolyard crush (in the days when she was known as Na-young), with whom she went on a sweet, parent-chaperoned date aged 12, after which her family emigrated to Toronto, breaking both of their hearts.  
More than a decade passes before the pair reconnect. When the now New York-based Nora searches for Hae-sung on Facebook, she finds that he has been looking for her and a string of messages and videocalls ensue. However, the geographical distance between them, and a commitment to pursuing their respective careers (Nora is a fledgling playwright, Hae-sung is studying to be an engineer) thwarts anything further. Soon afterwards, they enter into relationships with others, Nora meeting Arthur, the man she will marry, at a writers’ retreat. Later, as we have glimpsed, Nora and Hae-sung reunite in her adoptive city.

This profoundly moving, perversely quiet film shares many fundamentals with Song’s own story. Digging deep within herself to ask some difficult questions, Song rejects the melodramatic cliches of a typical tug-of-love tale, considering instead how falling in love is impacted by who we are, who we once were, and what we share, and how choosing one life path inevitably leads to the loss of another. She explores the Korean idea of ‘in-yun’, a concept related to fate that attributes our relationships with loved ones to connections that can be traced back through our past lives, with these bonds drawing us back together time after time, century after century. 
Song also considers the personality shifts that we undergo over time that might make us unrecognisable to those who knew us many years previously, or how the opposite might be true and how not knowing our former selves and history may render part of us forever off-limits to a current partner. It’s territory that’s further complicated by questions of cultural identity and language. Arthur tells Nora: ‘you dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like there’s a whole place inside you that I can’t go.’ And reconnecting with Hae-sung makes Nora feel both more and less Korean; he reminds her of what she has left behind and yet she’s also struck by how unlike him she has become.

Taking additional inspiration from the moment in Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present when she is unexpectedly confronted by Ulay, her ex-partner and former collaborator (whom she hadn’t seen in two decades), and the ensuing emotional response, Past Lives is intensely engaging and stimulating. It’s handsomely and fascinatingly handled by Song and performed with striking subtlety by Lee, Yoo and Magaro, who keep you guessing in a film that gradually illuminates but doesn’t overexplain the trio’s internal lives. Moon Seung-ah and Leem Seung-min are adorable and credible as Nora and Hae-sung’s younger selves.
Past Lives combines captivating spirituality with a more cooly rational approach to interrogating relationships, blending Eastern and Western ways of thinking. And, as it dwells on romantic and cultural loss, this thematically ambitious film broadens its scope beautifully to ponder the very nature of existence.

Past Lives is in cinemas from Friday 8 September.