Past Lives is an exquisite film made with great precision and care about what could have been, even if what could have been does not mean it should have been. Forgive me; it’s a hard film to pin down. That it’s exquisitely affecting and made with great precision and care is enough for now. No need to make a song and dance about it. Indeed, as Past Lives so deftly shows, you can have an excellent drama without any of the drama.

This is a first film from Celine Song, who is Canadian-Korean and otherwise a playwright. It opens with a scene in New York where three people are sitting at a bar and an unseen pair are trying to guess what their stories are, as you do. (‘Is the white guy her husband? No, she’s not even talking to him.’) What has brought this trio together?

The film then spools back 24 years to Seoul where Na Young and Hae Sung are 12 years old and best friends, even if she sulks when he achieves a better grade than her. ‘I’m probably going to marry him one day,’ she tells her mother. But their relationship is upended when her family emigrates to Canada and they cease all contact for 12 years.

Na Young (Greta Lee), who now calls herself Nora, is an aspiring playwright living in Manhattan when she decides to look up Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) online – as you do. They Skype and text and there’s still a bond but then she calls it off on the grounds that she needs to ‘commit’ to her life in America. There are times when we don’t quite understand her thinking. (Does she want to deny the Korean part of her?) But then neither does she. We then spool forward another 12 years to when he visits her in Manhattan, by which time she is married to a fellow writer, Arthur (John Magaro). This is the trio we had seen sitting at the bar.

That’s about it plot-wise, yet it is beautifully handled throughout and narratively propulsive because, even though it’s a drama without drama, we’re accustomed to dramas packed with drama, so what are we, as an audience, hoping for? That Nora will run off with Hae Sung? Or that she won’t? There are moments of tension such as their first meeting in a park. He is nervously waiting, smoothing his hair, and she calls over to him. Will they reconnect? What if they do? Arthur points out that this situation has the potential to be a soap opera where he would probably be cast as ‘the evil American husband standing in the way of a great destiny’.

But that is not what this is. He is anxious but not aggressively or confrontationally so. He, too, is seeking to understand. He tells her that when she talks in her sleep she talks in Korean and ‘there is a place inside you where I can’t go’. I read an interview with Song saying that she kept Magaro and Yoo apart until their characters meet on film, so that when they do they are genuinely appraising each other for the first time. Also, when Lee and Yoo hug in the park it’s their first hug, as they’d been prohibited from any physical interaction during rehearsals. It feels true because it is.

There isn’t a shot that isn’t graceful or pleasing or that makes you wonder what it’s doing there. Reflections in water; a passer-by with a little white dog; a carousel: all suggest a work of great composure. As for the performances, they are delicate and gorgeous. I think I may be in love with Greta Lee myself. There is nothing that shouts in Past Lives, but there is certainly plenty to shout about.