A pair of childhood sweethearts (Greta Lee and Teo Yoo) reconnect in this semi-autobiographical, inter-continental, star-crossed love story.

Spanning 24 years, the plot follows Na Young from Seoul to New York to become a playwright. She tracks down her Childhood friend whom she hasn’t seen for 12 years, and they rekindle their friendship online. We catch up with them again 12 years later, when Hae Sung goes to visit his now-married former classmate.

It is a curious friendship to go 12 years at a time without speaking, resulting in a Relationship you never quite buy into. The drama is predicated on a deep connection from childhood which we never actually see, as the scenes in South Korea only show the school friends arguing about a test and then holding hands. It is cute enough but insuffient to convince us of some enduring lost romance.

Past Lives is more interesting as a portrayal of the immigrant experience, the relationship a proxy for Na Young’s (who changes her name to Nora) desire to leave her old life behind. The result is sad but neglects to show much of her new life either, rendering the picture joyless and even drab. It lacks the emotional ebb and flow of something like The Farewell, another A24 release that told its immigrant story with pathos, humour and charming characters.

Here the characters are incredibly ordinary, which makes it realistic but gives us no real reason to find their lives particularly interesting. If anything the close proximity to such strained relationships feels uncomfortable, and deliberately so. The film opens from the point of view of strangers watching the pair in a bar, with Nora looking straight down the lens as if to confront its own voyeurism.

The movie is well directed by Celine Song, who creates distance between the characters through her shot compositions, conversational pauses and even dropped connections on Skype. The video calls have a real post-lockdown resonance, when technology made us closer than ever yet so much further apart. And the music from Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen provides a dreamy backdrop, even if the foreground fails to conjure many sparks.