Was the perfect film I woke up this morning looking for: slow, thought-provoking, Asian, and cityscape. Liked it from the start. It got me reminiscing about my pre-teens. I was the same as Nayeong except I refused to leave, but I knew ultimately I’d have to (also the guy and my crush from elementary school look insanely alike).

I don’t believe in dwelling on missing someone after a failed relationship, so I guess the reason the two protagonists remain ‘missing’ each other so much is that they never started, and neither did they bring a formal closure. But we can still have the right to miss the version of ourselves left behind when we start something with someone, in some place we’re never visiting again. What part of me have I left with who that I don’t possess anymore? And what makes me not the same person as myself from twenty years ago?

Seeing the past few years of my life as trapped in an infinite loop, I’ve realized it is increasingly difficult for me to throw away many things from the past. The phases I’m in, in the unit of a year, put my life on repeat. But two years from now I’ll be in another country, twenty years from now I’ll be in bed with some white guy. I hope I’ll still have the nerve to miss the girl I texted goodnight to and the people who sang me to sleep every single day, the entire time I spent in the place I call home.

So the film's title, ‘past lives’, as I see it, does not refer to the nonsense Korean mythology used to seduce girls, but to the possible lives that we abandoned to make a decision. It’s satirical that, somehow we are not our original selves anymore after making the choices for the sake of ‘being ourselves’.