Genre : Romance / Drama

Runtime : 1hr 46min

Language : English

IMDb : 7.8/10

Rotten Tomatoes : 95%

Letterboxd : 4.2/5

Metacritic : 94%

Wikipedia : Link

Director : Celine Song

Cast

Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, Seung-ah Moon, Seung-Min Yim, Ji-Hye Yoon

Plot

Past Lives follows Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood friends in Seoul, whose lives diverge when Nora’s family emigrates to North America. Years later, as Nora becomes an aspiring writer in New York, and Hae Sung continues his life in South Korea, they remain connected through fleeting messages and memories. Their paths cross again for a week when Hae Sung visits New York—this reunion forces both to confront how time, distance, and unspoken yearnings shape identity and love. Nora, now married, is now balancing her present life with the haunting question of what might have been. Hae Sung, thoughtful and distant, represents the life Nora might have lived had she stayed. The film delicately examines immigration, cultural dislocation, and the idea of destiny: whether two people, deeply bound by past connection, can ever truly reconcile the “lives unlived.” Quiet, emotionally resonant, Past Lives shows that sometimes the most profound stories are the ones lived in the spaces between decisions.