Those with one eye trained on the Hollywood press might feel hoodwinked while watching Past Lives, a film which reaches for giddy emotional heights while remaining altogether too earthbound. Its ambitions are clear: spanning multiple decades and continents, it is ostensibly the tale of two grand tragedies. The first is a love, found and lost; the second is a series of immigrations. Both engender heartache, a yen for the people and places forfeited to history.

Seung-ah Moon as Na Young and Seung-min Yim as Hae Sung.

After a brief prologue set in the present, we are shuttled back twenty-four years and meet the central pair whose paths will converge twice more in the film. Here, they are tweens: the precocious, stubborn Na Young (Seung-ah Moon) and her schoolyard crush, Hae Sung (Seung-min Yim). Na Young’s family, preparing for an imminent move from Seoul to Canada, pack the detritus of their lives into cardboard boxes. The childhood sweethearts convene for one last hurrah: a date at a sculpture park where they clamber through stone effigies, eyes wide and limbs akimbo.

We are never privy to the precise impetus behind the move; it’s implicit. Why would anyone not in immediate danger uproot their life but for the distant fantasy of opportunity? They are immigrating, sniffs Na Young, ‘because Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize in literature’. She’s meant to be the stubborn one, but it is Hae Sung who will think of her again and again as their lives spiral away from one another, obdurate in his search for the innocent romance they once shared.

The narrative ruptures, flashing forward twelve years. It is the early 2010s, made startlingly clear by a Skype tone ringing from a laptop – that carol of displacement, bubbly and plasticky in its false promise of intercontinental exchange. Na Young is now Nora (Greta Lee), a recent transplant to New York City; Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo), back in South Korea, has just completed his mandatory military service. They have not spoken since childhood, but – buoyed by the nascent thrills of social media – they reconnect over stuttering video calls.

At first, the pair can merely gawp at each other, incredulous. They practise a kind of necromancy, communing with their tween-aged selves. ‘You’re the same as the twelve-year-old I remember,’ Hae Sung gushes. The illusion cannot hold. Skype streams blister into a splutter of pixels; their conversations become a parade of stilted sounds and lagging frames. ‘Can you hear me?’ they repeat like a prayer. Soon, their reunion falls prey to an antagonist impervious to their human travails: the internet. Their love story is doomed to evanescence. Nora watches Hae Sung slip away into the imposing void of a blank screen.

Song, who wrote and directed Past Lives after a decade-long career as a playwright, frames these initial two acts deftly. They are economical fragments of storytelling which compress tidal waves of fervour into compact gestures: the way Hae Sung cracks open like a sunburst when he first witnesses Nora as an adult; or, later, once they have ceased communications, the creeping smile across Nora’s face as she peers into the crepuscular landscape of an artists’ retreat upstate, imagining her future unravelling before her. The success of both characters relies, in no small part, on Lee’s and Yoo’s adroitness as actors conjuring something close to childlike glee. It’s disarming.

Teo Yoo as Hae Sung and Greta Lee as Nora.

The problem lies in the film’s final third, which hops forward another twelve years to the present day. Nora is a flourishing playwright married to a fellow writer – the nebbish Arthur (John Magaro). Hae Sung, whose life remains mysterious to us beyond the basic facts of his job and his continued longing for Nora, visits America for a weeklong sojourn, hoping to glimpse his childhood sweetheart once more.

Past Lives, thus far, has been building towards a seismic conclusion. Nora and Hae Sung have not seen each other in person for more than two decades; we wait, breathlessly, for all the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ tension to erupt when they finally meet as thirty-somethings. But the moment is oddly devoid of frisson. It comes and goes without fanfare. We cut away to a flashback from their sculpture park date as testament to the longevity of their spark, but it only heightens the gulf between these two adults who, despite Song’s best efforts, remain acquaintances at best.

The film grows tedious as Nora and Hae Sung, for the duration of his trip, meander through the city, any hint of desire sublimated beneath the patter of small talk. These longueurs are aggressively tasteful, soundtracked by noodly strums and celestial twinkles, rendered in gauzy light speckled with the patina of film grain. And yet Song mistakes aesthetic beauty for true profundity. There is no entropy to her characters’ relationship; they perform the motions of romance without ever succumbing to its unruly instincts.

Desire, like immigration, must entail a degree of violence – a part of one’s being sacrificed to the heat of yearning. In Past Lives, both experiences leave their sufferers unscathed. Nora, per her own admission, is content in America; the film is shorn of jealousy, grief, or even pleasure, in favour of a placid, chaste maturity. Tethered to their current lives, Nora and Hae Sung simply accept the immutability of things. What they once shared floats above them like a dream. But to vocalise a dream is to rob it of its immediacy, to render it trite. Sometimes it’s best kept to yourself.

Past Lives (StudioCanal) is on national release from 31 August 2023.