Metacritic reviews

There are three superb performances at the picture’s centre, but none is more radiant than that of Greta Lee, gracefully capturing the spirit of a searching soul who seems to understand things about the nuances of love that are beyond the grasp of the rest of us.

Past Lives is an exquisitely wistful drama that speaks with an honesty so affectingly crisp it will turn your conceptions of love, identity and fate on their head.

Past Lives is not concerned with regret. It is instead a thoughtful, humane rumination on what may be fixed in personal history but remains forever fluid in the mind.

For all the films that have been made about love triangles, Song has fashioned hers in the form of a circle, defying so many of the clichés in her quietly devastating way.

The absolute immediacy of Lee’s performance allows you to feel every frame of Past Lives on your skin, which is crucial to a film that conveys the brunt of its meaning through sense instead of story; a film that commands its placid rhythms and ethereal fussiness with a confidence that elevates Song’s “people don’t talk like that” dialogue into a decisive plus.

Past Lives shows that living in what-ifs is not good. Instead, it’s important to be grateful for our time with people, even if it’s not forever.

The dreamy, deliberate pacing of all of this never feels overlong. Instead, the film gathers you up in its hands and carries you along with it, resulting it what will surely be one of the best films of 2023.

It’s soulful, tender — an understated triumph. Song’s directing and writing is confident, bringing so much heart and nuance to a simple story that is inspiring, delicate, and evocative.

Song is a writer of elegant restraint and as the final act progressed, I worried that perhaps this restraint might end up a little too delicate for the years that have preceded and the feelings that have amassed. But then in a bar scene for the ages, we find ourselves floored, a slow buildup that finally hits like a bus.

It’s a warm, patient film culminating in a quietly powerful, reflective finale, though its sum is greater than its parts when the first two sections register a touch underdeveloped.