Is Past Lives an Early Oscar Contender?

Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s directorial debut brings as much comfort as it does grief balancing the ideas of the lives we choose and the life that gets away.

Past Lives boasts no elaborate resume from it’s first-time filmmaker, showcases no big name actors, but is unapologetically personal. Song tapped into her personal experiences as she reconciles the idea of “what is”, “what was” and the big one – “what if”.

The movie unfolds in three time periods, across two decades and two continents following Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, who are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. 20 years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny.

Song, like Nora, is a playwright who emigrated from Korea to Canada as a kid, and now lives in New York with her American husband. This story was utterly personal for Song, and it shows.

IndieWire writes, “The hit of Sundance and Berlin, A24’s “Past Lives” marks not only a remarkably assured debut, but also a likely Oscar contender.” It isn’t a surprise that we’re talking Oscars during the summer, because Song could easily nab a nomination for director and original screenplay (in my opinion).

I was prepared to fall in love with this movie, but I couldn’t help but feel like parts were underdeveloped. With what felt like a sort of surface-level exploration, perhaps a deeper dive into the characters would have given me a greater appreciation of their story and their fateful love triangle.

While Past Lives is a profound gut-punch of a movie, it left me wanting something I didn’t receive, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s better to focus on the “what is” and not the “what if” in life? It isn’t as masterful as I’d hoped, but it did make me ugly cry, so that says something either about the movie or about me.