Of all the writers' retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night – setting the stage for a first kiss that, like so many of the most resonant moments in Celine Song’s transcendent “Past Lives”, will ultimately be left to the imagination – Nora (Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of Yin-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before. When Arthur asks Nora if she really believes in all that, the Seoul-born woman sitting across from him invitingly replies that it’s just “something Korean people say to seduce someone”. Needless to say, it works.

         But as this delicate yet crushingly beautiful film continues to ripple forward in time – the wet clay of Nora and John’s flirtation hardening into a marriage in the span of a single cut – the very real life they create together can’t help but run parallel to the imagined one that Nora seemed fated to share with the childhood sweetheart she left back in her birth country. She and Hae Sung (“Leto” star Teo Yoo) haven’t seen each other in the flesh since they were in grade school, but the ties between them have never entirely frayed apart.

       On the contrary, they seem to knot together in unexpected ways every 12 years, as Hae Sung orbits back around to his first crush with the cosmic regularity of a comet passing through the sky above. The closer he comes to making contact with Nora, the more heart-stoppingly complicated her relationship with destiny becomes. And with each passing scene in this film – all of them so hushed and sacrosanct that even their most uncertain moments feel as if they’re being repeated like an ancient prayer – it grows easier to appreciate why Nora invoked In-Yun on that seismic Montauk night. Sure, maybe she really was just using it as a pick-up line, knowing that it would give her (neurotically Jewish) future husband the green light that he needed to make a move. But then again, what could possibly be more seductive to a person in this world than the promise of divine providence?