Past Lives is a rare love film, touching with its adorably simple visual language and accurate, but few-worded dialogue. The silence in this drama is more telling than spoken words could ever be.

Love theme on film is about as worn out as a book on the bookshelf. Most varieties of complications and other entanglements, we have already seen unfold from various different angles. What is happening here is not really an exception. We've seen it before, but rarely has it been this wonderful and poignant. Playwright Celine Song, making her feature film debut, has both written and directed this subtle, and constantly vibrating masterpiece.

Past Lives is about Na Young and Hae Sung. We meet them as young kids at home in Seoul, when they are an innocently blushing couple, a boyfriend and a girlfriend. When she moves with her family to Canada, they lose touch. Many years later, they look each other up on Facebook and begin an intimate digital relationship. They are close despite the distance and can and do talk about anything. After a while, Nora (as Na Young is now called), to Hae Sung's great sadness, wants to take a break. Real life soon resurfaces, and they both begin new relationships. The feelings still remain and when they see each other many years later, their friendship is tested, but also their loyalty to their partners.

In a way, this is a classic triangle drama. The story revolves around two people, and mainly affects a third. The focus is on Nora and Hae Sung, and it is their lives and longings that we get to share, and it is them that we care about. At the same time, no drama happens in a vacuum, and their actions and choices will cast a shadow over others as well. This is a film about feelings, and about love then and now. It is also about past lives and about fate, but also about accepting what has become, and not chasing what could have been.

Song has written a story that creates shockwaves of emotion in us viewers. The film lies in wait with its seemingly unassuming style, and shoots emotional arrows at us when we least expect it. The experience is heartbreakingly sweet, honest and at the same time so painful that it tears me up inside.

At first glance, the photo is not very remarkable, but still everything is so incredibly beautiful and the color tone is pleasant. The camera makes interesting horizontal runs, as if in a circular movement, which envelops the drama, but which also carefully highlights what pulsates at its core.

The dialogue is sparse, with many, long gaps of silence. However, it is never long-winded or uneventful in these, because it is often in the silence that the drama takes place. What is not expressed in words is expressed in everything else we see, in the looks, in the awkward smiles and the intensely contradictory longing for what never was. Song relies on the power of stillness, but also on her tight acting trio of Greta Lee as Nora, Teo Yoo as Hae Sung and John Magaro as Nora's husband Arthur. They are all convincing and do everything exactly right. It's hard to explain what makes their acting so good in this, because it's really about the fact that it's not an acting we watch. They don't play, they just are. It is their presence in the situation and their trust in the story, which radiates such obviousness that it rubs off on us.

Past Lives is a fantastically fine and multifaceted film, as beautiful as it is painful and as low-key as it is explosive. As the film moves towards its inevitable end, there are questions left unexplained, but there's no rush in me to get any answers. The magic is in the enigmatic and unspoken, and when the film ends, I end so with tears in my eyes, but with a wide smile in my heart.