Past Lives was one of my favorite movies of 2023. It’s a heartfelt, funny romantic drama; a nuanced depiction of grown-up love; and a remarkable first feature from writer-director Celine Song, a playwright and dedicated gamer. Before Past Lives, Song previously staged a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull within a Sims game and regularly plays Valorant, Overwatch, and Fortnite.
Turns out The Sims isn’t the only video game franchise present in Song’s work: Overwatch makes a brief appearance in Past Lives. The level of detail in the script caught me by surprise. After meeting up with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) for the first time in years, Nora (Greta Lee) returns home to find her husband Arthur (John Magaro) playing Overwatch. Overwatch isn’t terribly relevant to the scene – it’s just the activity he’s doing when she comes home, but the Oscar-nominated script is quite specific about who he’s playing and what happens in his game.
Image: A24
The Past Lives script specifies Arthur plays Zenyatta, and even adds some information about who Zenyatta is and what he’s all about. It’s also a great character detail for Arthur, a sweet man who absolutely would play a support character in a team game, and is relatively understanding about the love of his life’s childhood sweetheart suddenly entering the picture.
A character’s choice of who they play in a game like Overwatch is an under-tapped mine of personality-building in fiction. There’s also a bit of comedy in here: “DEFEAT” showing up in all-caps immediately after Nora reveals Hae Sung did indeed come to New York to see her is great stuff. (And as a coworker joked: “This is why no one wants to play support. There’s always the concern that your wife is gonna leave you.”)
Song’s next project is the rom-com Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Like Past Lives (and Challengers, written by her husband, Justin Kuritzkes), it reportedly focuses on a love triangle. But I know what I’m most focused on: which video game will get an unexpected mention.