NOTE: SPOILERS HEREIN FOR PAST LIVES!

It took me a while to warm up to A24.

I remember prior to Everything Everywhere All At Once, I had not yet knowingly been wow’ed by anything the studio distributed. I mostly just thought of A24 as the company that valued style over substance. Their movies generally looked good, but I tended to think the stories were often under-developed.

Fortunately, EEAAO changed everything for me (it is also very stylish, but I ADORED its substance). And since it came out last year, I’ve been a lot more open-minded and happy to try out the studio’s offerings. And now I’m damn-near a fan of theirs.

So when I first started seeing trailers for Past Lives, I thought, “Sure, that definitely looks at least worth my time”. An A24 feature based on interpersonal dynamics and the lives of real people? I’m in! And with it finally getting a wider release this past weekend (it had been out in very limited release for the past four weeks), I headed out to my theater to give it shot.

The story is of two children, Na-Young and Hae-Sung, living in Kora, each with a crush on the other. But Na-Young’s family is emigrating to Canada, so they are separated right as they start to discover their innocent, childlike romance.

Twelve years pass, and Na-Young, now going by her Anglicized name Nora, has since immigrated to New York. On a lark, she looks up “that little boy I used to have a huge crush on”, only to find he has since been trying to find her, as well. They return to a friendship centered entirely around online communique for several months. As feelings develop between them, Nora decides to end things when she deduces it will be over a year before they ever see each other in person due to their busy lives.

And then, again, twelve years pass! Nora has since met and married another writer named Arthur, and Hae-Sung just got out of his own relationship and decides it is finally time to finally visit New York and meet up with Nora, the one that got away.

So he does that thing! And things progress from there.

The core of the movie is the concept on In-Yun, a layering of the destiny built between people as they move in and out of each other’s lives, leading to more connections between them in their future reincarnations. It’s Nora’s description of this that leads to her first kiss with Arthur, and it’s what Hae-Sung clings to when he wonders why he can’t get Nora out of his mind throughout his life.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+The story is engaging from beginning to end, and I imagine most, if not all viewers, will watch this and constantly be considering what they would do if they were in any of the three main characters’ shoes. You do spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, and the people that have come into and out of it, as you watch Past Lives. Who was maybe a fleeting part of your life that you wish had been around longer? Who have you known on a smaller surface level that maybe you should have known more deeply?

The idea of In-Yun is a very romantic and hopeful one. I can’t say it’s anything I believe in, but the concept of it is more beautiful and rewarding to me than that of, say, heaven or hell. It’s like you and everyone you meet is entangled in this expansive web of interpersonal relationships, and with each new life, your strand on the web is rebuilt. Your connections move closer to some and further from others. This is obviously not the first I’d heard of reincarnation, but the In-Yun aspect is newer to me, and I enjoyed getting to learn about it.

+The movie does a fine job of subverting your expectations as a filmgoer. There is no major drama over infidelity. No one is really the “bad guy”. When you worry that a character is about to make a terrible choice just to build tension–when you think Hae-Sung will blow up at Nora for ending their contact in the middle years, or you think Arthur will be an asshole about Hae-Sung to Nora, or you think Nora is going to kiss Hae-Sung–it doesn’t happen. The movie feels more grounded that way; it’s a more lived-in experience than a forced drama. And I appreciate that.

–I’m not entirely sure I love the pacing of this effort, or what the movie decides to show the audience vis a vis what it chooses to leave out. When you think of what people who don’t care for independent drama flicks don’t like about them, you think about glacial plots, complaints that “nothing happens”, and choosing to care about shots or music choices more than plot or story. And honestly, a lot of that is on display here.

There are aspects of these characters’ lives I’d LOVED to have seen more of. More of Hae-Sung and Nora as children so I could more buy how they have remembered each other for so long. More of Nora and Arthur’s relationship so I can see why she loves him so much. More of how Hae-Sung contacts Nora to say he is coming to New York. But we don’t get these moments.

What we get instead are long, lingering shots of people looking at each other, or walking, or standing, or saying “Whoa” about a dozen times in a row. And there is value to those moments, but maybe only when the rest of the pieces are more firmly in place.

-There’s no graceful way to put this, so I’ll just say it: Greta Lee outshines her costars here. Compared to her, Teo Yoo and John Magaro are simply adequate. While she is amazing and conflicted and powerful and multi-faceted, Yoo’s Hae-Sung feels stuck in third gear as a character. He is hopeful and a bit stunted socially, but we don’t really get a sense of WHY he has pined for his childhood friend for twenty years. John Magaro’s Arthur almost feels like a man-child at points, and the strength of character he shows in the last few scenes doesn’t feel earned.

And maybe that’s not fair! Maybe Greta Lee just does SUCH a fantastic job that no one was ever going to compare. Maybe Yoo and Magaro’s problems are more tied to my first Down in that the plot didn’t flesh them out enough for the actors to have enough to work with.

But hey, it’s a good movie, and you need to make the Downs where you can find them.

OVERALL

Past Lives is both endearing and engaging despite its wildly low-stakes subject matter and slow pace. I do wish that it had devoted some of its runtime to different developments in these lives rather than, like, “here’s Nora walking for 2 minutes”, but while I was watching it, I was all-the-way invested in all three of these people. Definitely a recommend if you like character study movies.