Past Lives is a film about in-yun, the Korean concept of a fateful connection between people across lifetimes. But it approaches that concept with restraint rather than mysticism, grounding its metaphysics in something far more ordinary and far more painful: the experience of choosing your life and understanding what that choice cost you.

Greta Lee plays Nora, who left Seoul as a child and rebuilt herself in New York. Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung, the boy she left behind. They reconnect twice, once in their twenties over video call, once twelve years later when he visits her in New York. She is married to another man, Arthur, played by John Magaro.

The film’s great achievement is that it makes Arthur a fully human presence. He is not an obstacle or a villain. He is a man who loves his wife and is old enough to understand what he is watching unfold across the dinner table, the ghost of a life his wife did not live, a version of herself she closed off when she crossed an ocean.

Celine Song’s debut feature is astonishing in its confidence. She trusts her actors and her silences. The ending, a few minutes of street corner conversation and then a taxi pulling away, achieves something extraordinary: it makes you feel, without stating it, the weight of every road not taken in every life you have lived or could have lived.

This is a great film. Watch it alone.