Past Lives is one of the very best films of the year

Every generation has a bittersweet-tinged love story, with The Graduate and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind just some examples in the storied genre, and Past Lives is right up there with them.

The tagline for the Robert Redford film Ordinary People claimed “some films you watch, others you feel,” and this applies to Past Lives.

The achingly beautiful debut film from writer-director Celine Song tells the story of Nora, a young South Korean immigrant who reconnects with her old childhood sweetheart in New York City.

Despite a running time of just over 100 minutes, Past Lives packs in an entire lifetime of regret and joy.

The beauty of Past Lives is that the film is both complex but simple, poetic yet sparse and tear-inducing for a myriad of reasons.

The way the film weaves all of these paradoxes together is masterful and has to be seen to be believed.

To go into specifics about the plot would be doing it a great disservice, but suffice it to say, Past Lives is one of the very best films you will see this year if not this decade.

Past Lives is a film that comes back to you a week after you see it, where certain little moments run back in your brain.

There is plenty to recommend with the film outside of the terrific story, with a beautiful jazzy score, warm cinematography and three unforgettable lead performances at the centre tying the whole thing together.

Every scene has tangible electricity to it, and the film is a masterclass in behavioural acting.

So much of the power of Past Lives is all in the body language of the actors, and star Greta Lee deserves all the plaudits for managing to communicate what her character is feeling by a simple look on her face, a well-deployed eyebrow raise or a quivering lip.

Past Lives excels in the unspoken moments between the characters, and that is an incredibly difficult task for any film to pull off – for Song to pull this off on her debut film is nothing short of a miracle.

The genius of Past Lives is that it makes the viewer feel like they are right there with the characters, a simple trick that was mastered by the great Jonathan Demme and has been mastered here by Song.

Song has talked at length in the media about the film being a millennial love story, and for viewers of a certain vintage, seeing the old Skype layout from 2010 or old smartphone designs from back in the day will send the memories of talking to friends on MSN or BBN flooding right back.

The Graduate perfectly captured how the baby boomer generation faced uncertainty back in 1967, and Past Lives has pulled the same trick for millennials.

Nostalgia has become a crutch for many a filmmaker in the modern era (think the Stranger Things method of using popular music) but in Past Lives, it is deployed in such a way that hits the viewer right into the receptors that perceive past heartbreaks or regrets.

Past Lives could have been made by Billy Wilder in the 1950s or Nora Ephron in the 1990s, and this timeless story of boy meets girl colliding with the realities of the modern world is as crushing as it is revitalising.

Oppenheimer is most likely going to walk away with the most Oscars at next year’s ceremony, but it would be unwise to rule out Past Lives as its most significant competition.

The genius of Past Lives is that it reflects the messy, unpredictable nature of being a young person finding their way in the world, and like The Worst Person In The World before it, it manages to capture that lightning in a bottle.

For all the talk of Hollywood being out of ideas or simply rehashing old ideas time and time again, Past Lives is the film to make you fall in love with the art form all over again.