Celine Song, the director who films what desire costs before anyone admits the price

Celine Song

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 19, 1988 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Awards	2 Academy Award (nomination) · Independent Spirit · Whiting

There is a moment in each of Celine Song’s films when the characters know something they are not saying. Not secrets in the thriller sense — more like the knowledge that a relationship has become what it will remain, and that to name it out loud would be to finish it. Song builds her cinema in that pause. She is not interested in the dramatic declaration; she is interested in the room before it, when feeling is still unresolved and the people in it still have choices they are not yet ready to give up.

Song was born in Seoul in 1988 and moved with her family to Markham, Ontario, when she was twelve. Upon arriving in Canada, she chose the name Celine — a small and deliberate act of self-composition, the kind of choice that becomes a subject later. Her father, Song Neung-han, is a filmmaker; her mother is an illustrator and graphic designer. She grew up between two languages and two countries, and then moved to New York City, which gave her a third way of understanding what it means to belong.

At Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she completed an MFA in playwriting, Song found a form suited to the kind of precision she was after. Theater allows silence to be structural — the pause is as scripted as the speech, and the audience is fixed in place, unable to look away from the stillness. Her play Endlings, which received its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in 2019, worked in the same register: people at the edge of losing something, unable to say exactly what it is. It made her a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The New York theater world recognized what she was doing. Film took a little longer to notice.

Past Lives, her debut feature, began as a question about the Korean concept of in-yeon — the idea that two people share a thread of fate if they have crossed paths in prior lives. Song built the film around a specific crossing: a childhood friendship in Seoul between a girl named Nora and a boy named Hae Sung, interrupted when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada, resumed years later across a video call from opposite sides of the world, and concluded in New York when Hae Sung visits and finds Nora married to an American writer. The film watches the three of them in a bar and asks what the prior-life logic means when the person you might have loved is standing in front of the person you chose.

A24 distributed the film in the summer of 2023 after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, and the reception was immediate and sustained. Past Lives earned two Academy Award nominations — for Best Picture and for Best Original Screenplay, making Song the first woman of Asian descent nominated in the Original Screenplay category — along with nominations from BAFTA and the Golden Globes. It won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature in 2024. The film’s particular achievement was formal: it made restraint feel like a complete emotional vocabulary. Every scene where Song withheld the expected sentiment earned the quiet ones.

The question her second film posed was whether the same method could hold a different subject. Materialists is set in contemporary Manhattan, among people for whom desire has been partially formatted into the language of the market. Lucy is a professional matchmaker, skilled at translating longing into compatible specifications and charging accordingly. Song films the surfaces — the apartments, the tailored clothes, the city’s ambient wealth — with the same precise flatness she brought to Past Lives, and then lets the cracks appear the same way: through what the characters cannot quite finish saying.

The casting is the film’s argument made visible. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy as composed surface, a woman who has made stillness into a professional instrument and cannot easily switch it off in private. Pedro Pascal takes Harry, the match who satisfies every stated metric — wealthy, gentle, correct — and therefore registers as slightly unreal, an answer that has no friction in it. Chris Evans plays John, Lucy’s actor ex, whose career has not arrived and whose return introduces the one variable her system was built to exclude. Three of the most immediately likable faces in American cinema are arranged here as a structural problem rather than a fantasy.

Cast

The continuity between the two films is in what Song trusts a shot to do without assistance. Working with cinematographer Shabier Kirchner and composer Daniel Pemberton on Materialists, the collaborations produce a film that would rather hold a face than explain what the face is feeling. The approach is identical to Past Lives and comes from the same instinct: that a scene is not the dialogue, it is what happens in the room while the dialogue is happening.

What Materialists does not entirely resolve is whether a film this beautifully appointed about beautiful objects can fully indict the world it photographs. The apartments stay gorgeous whether or not the script is skeptical of them. The charm of the performances creates the same difficulty: casting actors this easy to forgive can soften an argument that wants edges. A romantic triangle about whether love can survive being priced still has to stage the moment the price stops mattering, and that moment is harder to earn than to propose. Whether the film achieves it or stops just before has been the central debate, and Song has not answered it directly, which may be part of the method.

Song has been married since 2016 to the playwright and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes — the writer behind Challengers and Queer — whom she met at an Edward F. Albee Foundation residency. Both are writers interested in what people in close proximity fail to say to each other. They live in New York.

The work that follows Materialists includes Damage, a drama in development at HBO that would be Song’s first television project as a director, and a writing assignment for Sony: a sequel to My Best Friend’s Wedding, extending her engagement with the romantic form without requiring her to direct it. Song has made clear that the romantic comedy is a serious subject — a form in which the conventions themselves become the argument — and the range of what she is developing suggests she is not finished testing the premise.

With Damage in development and only two features behind her, Song is at the earliest stage of a filmmaking career that has already done something unusual: it used quiet rooms and withheld sentences to put emotion at the center of serious cinema, and made a mainstream audience sit still for it.

Featured Films

Tags: Korean cinema, Pedro Pascal, Dakota Johnson, Materialists, Celine Song, Past Lives

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