What happens at the end of Past Lives hinges on one Korean word
Celine Song's first film, released by A24 in 2023, follows two people who cannot manage to be in the same country at the same time. It went to the 96th Academy Awards with nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay and won neither. The whole ending rests on a word Nora explains in the first act.
The word is in-yun (인연) — a Korean idea of fate expressed through relationships across many lifetimes. In the final scene, Hae Sung asks Nora who they might be to each other in the next life. She says she doesn't know. He says he'll see her then, gets into his Uber, and she walks back and cries.
What in-yun means
Nora (Greta Lee) explains it to Arthur (John Magaro) at the writers' retreat where they meet. If two strangers brush past each other in the street, that's in-yun from a past life. Layers of it accumulate; 8,000 layers produce a marriage. She also tells him it's what Koreans say when they want to sleep with someone.
The structure
- Seoul, the 1990s — Na Young and Hae Sung, both 12, walk home from school together. Her family emigrates to Canada.
- Twelve years later — they find each other online and spend months on video calls. Nora, now in New York and now Nora, ends it to focus on her work.
- Twelve years after that — Hae Sung flies to New York for a week. Nora has been married to Arthur for seven years.
- The last night — dinner at the flat, then a bar, where Nora and Hae Sung discuss in-yun in Korean while Arthur sits between them, unable to follow.
The final scene
Nora walks Hae Sung to the kerb to wait for his car. They stand in silence for a long time. Then he asks whether this life might itself be a past life, and what they will be to each other in the next one.
"I'll see you then."
That's his last line before the car pulls away. Nora walks the block back without speaking, Arthur is waiting on the steps, and she cries into his shoulder with no dialogue at all.
So does she regret it?
Song told Newsweek in 2023 that all three characters get what they came for, and that writing the bar scene felt like watching her own "past, present and future" collide. Hae Sung flew 14 hours to close a door on a 12-year-old he remembered. Read the pair as thwarted soulmates and Nora's tears are regret; read in-yun the way Song frames it and they're for Na Young, the girl who stayed in Seoul.