Past Lives (2023) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A bilingual love story about identity, migration, and the lives we leave behind without fully losing.
Past Lives follows Nora Moon, once Na Young, as her childhood bond with Hae Sung stretches across Korea, Canada, New York, Skype calls, marriage, memory, and decades of almosts. Celine Song’s screenplay is quiet but devastatingly precise: it does not build romance from melodramatic obstacles, but from timing, distance, cultural translation, and the ache of meeting someone who remembers a version of you that no longer exists in public.
For writers, this screenplay is essential study material for restraint, bilingual dialogue, emotional subtext, time jumps, immigrant identity, and romantic drama where the most powerful scenes are built from what characters cannot ask for.
Ready to get to work? Check out the Study Notes just below. When you're ready, download the Past Lives screenplay.
Past Lives Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
The Past Lives screenplay is useful to study because it builds emotional force from restraint, not spectacle. The script begins with strangers observing Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur in a bar, unable to identify the exact relationship between them. That question becomes the entire film. Are they lovers, old friends, almost-family, strangers, past selves, or something language cannot properly label? By moving between Korean and English, Seoul and New York, childhood and adulthood, the script turns identity into geography. Nora is not simply choosing between two men. She is standing between lives.
Craft Focus
- Opening as thesis: The bar scene frames the story as a mystery of relationship. Outsiders cannot read the trio correctly because the relationship itself exists outside simple categories.
- Time jumps with emotional precision: The script uses 24 years ago, 12 years pass, and later adulthood not as gimmicks, but as emotional architecture. Each jump shows what time preserves, distorts, and makes impossible.
- Bilingual identity: Korean and English are not interchangeable dialogue tools. They mark intimacy, distance, history, belonging, and the version of Nora each person can access.
- Romance without villainy: Hae Sung is not a threat to Arthur, and Arthur is not an obstacle to Hae Sung. The drama comes from maturity, kindness, and the pain of knowing love can be real without becoming a life.
Questions for Writers
- How does the screenplay make silence feel active rather than empty?
- Where does Nora’s name change from Na Young to Nora reveal the emotional cost of immigration?
- How does Hae Sung’s ordinariness become one of the script’s most powerful dramatic choices?
- How does Arthur’s awareness of being “the husband in the story” deepen the love triangle instead of flattening it?
While reading, pay attention to how Past Lives treats “what if” as a living presence. The screenplay never needs to declare that Nora and Hae Sung belong together, because that would make the story smaller. Instead, it lets them share sidewalks, video calls, childhood memories, untranslated feelings, and the strange gravity of in-yun. The craft trick is that the ending does not resolve the triangle by choosing one life over another. It allows Nora to grieve the life that did not happen while returning to the one that did.
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Past Lives (2023)
Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora's family emigrates from South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny.
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