So as this movie starts, we’re in a bar, watching three people — a woman and two men — from a distance, listening to voiceover of an unseen couple speculating about those people’s relationship to each other. Are those two married? Maybe those two are? Maybe none of them? It’s a mystery of sorts, for our anonymous people-watchers.

And then the movie jumps back twenty-four years earlier to Korea, and we see a twelve-year-old girl whose parents are about to immigrate with her to Toronto, and the boy who she’s had a puppy love crush on. And we’re going to spend time with them here, and then with each of them at different points in the decades leading up to that glimpsed-from-afar scene in the bar.

We’re going to see how the relationship between these two people evolves (and how that other guy enters the picture), and how that interacts with an immigrant experience, and about the stories and shared histories and chance moments that underlie relationships — and, really, the course of people’s lives.

I’m being vague, because this is a recent movie and you should really just watch it; but also because a bare plot summary wouldn’t do it justice. There was a really obvious movie to make here — one of the characters, a writer, knows all too well how that obvious story would go, and is convinced he’s in it — but it’s not that obvious thing. This is the more complicated and subtle and real movie (it’s at least somewhat autobiographical for director Celine Song — that moment in the bar was apparently the moment that inspired her to make this film), summoning emotions that are hard to sum up in words but that are clear as day onscreen.

Great stuff, highly recommended.