Movies Like
Movies Like Past Lives: Romantic Contemplations
By Jordan A. · · 6 min read
That feeling when you finish Past Lives and just sit in silence for a while? That's the mark of something genuinely special. Celine Song created a film about connection across time and distance, about two people who love each other in different ways in different lives. It's achingly romantic without being conventional, asking whether you can ever really let someone go or if some connections transcend timing. If you're searching for more stories about bittersweet love, soulmates separated by circumstance, and the ache of alternative paths, here are films that understand that particular flavor of heartbreak.
These recommendations explore the spaces between people - what's said and unsaid, what could have been, and what endures despite distance and time. They're for anyone who's ever wondered about the road not taken with someone they loved.
Long-Distance Love and Separated Soulmates
Before Sunrise (1995) follows two strangers who meet on a train and spend one night walking through Vienna talking about everything - love, death, dreams, regrets. They agree to meet again in six months. It's romantic not because of grand gestures but because of genuine connection and how perfectly two people can fit together verbally and emotionally. Richard Linklater made a film about the transcendence of conversation.
In the Mood for Love (2000) is Wong Kar-wai at his most beautiful and heartbreaking. Two neighbors discover their spouses are having an affair and slowly fall in love, but resist acting on it. The film is gorgeously composed and achingly restrained, capturing how love can exist without being consummated, how proximity and longing can be enough and never be enough simultaneously.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is about a couple who erase each other from their memories after a painful breakup, then reconnect and fall in love again. It's about whether you'd choose the pain of love over the peace of forgetting. The narrative structure is fragmented like memory itself, and it understands that some people are meant to collide repeatedly.
The Spectacular Now (2013) follows two teenagers in love, living in the moment without thinking about the future - until the future arrives anyway. It's melancholic about how even perfect summer love has an expiration date, and how that doesn't make it less real or transformative.
Contemplative Romance and Quiet Connection
Lunch in Copenhagen - actually, let me go with A Ghost Story (2017). It's about love that transcends death, about a man who becomes a ghost in a sheet, watching the woman he loves move on. It's devastatingly romantic in how it presents love as a kind of haunting, a permanent alteration of someone's existence.
Stalker (1979) is Andrei Tarkovsky's meditation on desire and faith. A guide leads a scientist and a writer through a mysterious zone toward a room that supposedly grants wishes. It's slow and philosophical, about the human tendency to idealize what we're chasing rather than appreciate what we have.
Memories of Murder - actually, for contemplative romance, Days of Being Wild (1990) is better. Wong Kar-wai's film about a charming drifter who leaves a trail of lovesick women behind him. It's visually intoxicating and captures how someone can matter enormously without actually being good for you.
Two Years Before the Mast - let me go with The Time That Remains (2009) instead, a poetic film about a Palestinian-Italian family across decades, exploring how love and displacement intersect. It's about connection forged and maintained across exile and time.
Romance Across Cultures and Worlds
Mulholland Drive (2001) is partially about two women who fall in love in Los Angeles and the cruelty of how Hollywood disrupts that connection. It's dreamlike and devastating, exploring how love can exist even when identity and memory are unstable.
Call Me By Your Name (2017) captures first love with such tenderness - a student and his father's graduate student falling in love over a summer in Italy. It's sensual and heartbreaking because you know from the beginning it's temporary. The ache is in the knowing.
Like Water for Chocolate (1992) is a magical realist romance about a woman who infuses her cooking with emotion, separated from her lover by family obligation. It's about love expressed through food and tradition, about how some bonds can't be severed even when people are kept apart.
Chungking Express (1994) is actually two loosely connected stories about men in love with women who don't love them back. Wong Kar-wai again, because he understands the particular loneliness of one-sided connection and urban isolation. The film's energy is melancholic and hypnotic.
Alternate Realities and "What If" Love Stories
The Fountain (2006) follows the same couple across three timelines - past, present, and future - exploring how love persists across incarnations. It's visually stunning and emotionally overwhelming, suggesting that some souls are meant to find each other repeatedly.
La La Land (2016) is about two artists in love in Los Angeles who must choose between their relationship and their dreams. The ending refuses the conventional romantic resolution, instead exploring how you can love someone deeply and still let them go. The bittersweet dance number at the end is one of cinema's great romantic moments.
Her (2013) is about a man falling in love with an AI. It sounds absurd until you realize it's a genuine exploration of connection, intimacy, and how someone can profoundly alter your understanding of yourself and what you want. The ache is real even if one party isn't.
About Time (2013) follows a father and son across years, with the son discovering he can time travel. It's more a film about family and regret than romance, but the central relationship between the father and son carries the emotional weight of a great love story - the love you have for people you're running out of time with.
Stories of Longing and Distance
The Bridges of Madison County (1995) captures four days between a photographer and a housewife. It's about how a brief encounter can reshape your entire life, about the love you carry silently. Clint Eastwood made something quietly devastating about roads not taken.
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) has a bittersweet center - two people who love each other but are fundamentally incompatible with stability or commitment. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak fit together beautifully and desperately until they don't.
Carol (2015) is about two women falling in love in 1950s America, when that love has to be hidden and sacrificed. It's achingly tender and politically fraught, celebrating a love that changes them both while acknowledging the cost of living in a world that can't accept them.
Looking for more contemplative, bittersweet stories about love that transcends time and circumstance? Browse our collection of romantic films about soulmates separated by fate.
Past Lives understands that the greatest loves aren't always the ones that end in marriage or conventional happiness. Sometimes it's the person you meet at the wrong time, the choice you make to let someone go, or the way someone changes you permanently by simply existing in your life. These films celebrate that profound, aching kind of love - the kind that stays with you across timelines and possibilities.
Topics covered: romance, drama, philosophical, indie, emotional, contemporary
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.