A man meets an enemy from his past life a small dog.


PAST LIFE is used with permission from Rose O'Shea. Learn more at https://imdb.com/title/tt22004626.


Terrence is an ambitious academic attending a party with his wife Ellen. The party is in his honor, and he's also hoping to make some vital connections that could help him earn tenure. He's keen to meet up with Dr. Dosteaux, a wellconnected professor who could help him climb the ladder.

Everything seems to be going well, but then he encounters an enemy from his past: a small dog named Herschel, whose owner also happens to be Dr. Dosteaux. Attempting to ensure his professional future, Terrence tries to work things out with Herschel. But to do so, he must resolve his past baggage with Herschel including the karmic debt he owes Herschel from their past lives.

Directed by Rose O'Shea and written by Jessica SeayKlatt and Andrew Hansen, who also stars as Terrence, this witty, nimble comedy begins like an acerbic, Walt Whitmanlike social study of a certain milieu of highminded, seemingly intellectual academics and the odd Ivory Tower mentality that undergirds their interactions and expectations. But the film zigzags into unexpected directions, thanks to its excellent writing, razorsharp eye for detail and complete commitment to its central premise: that people can clearly remember their past lives, which continue to shape their present ones.

Everyone in this world believes in reincarnation. Every character is aware of who (or what) they have been in their past iterations, and they matteroffactly bring it up as if they were chatting about the weather or perhaps their astrological sign. And most importantly, everyone carries their past relationship dynamics into their current lives, including old resentments and enmities. This is the case for Terrence, who runs into a small dog at the party. In the past, Terrence was a cheetah who ate the dog's son. And the dog hasn't forgotten, complicating Terrence's hopes to impress the dog's current owner.

The fun in both the storytelling and performances is when the narrative takes this collective belief in past lives and karma to its logical extreme, creating a chain of events that look outlandish to viewers' eyes but make total sense, considering the loopiness of this group. The most deeply held belief for these intellectual sophisticates is not their academic areas of expertise, but their fervent and reverent assumption that past lives shape everything, a contrast that the script has a lot of fun with. (One character says she was ragweed in the past, perhaps explaining her distinctive demeanor.)

Collectively, the ensemble cast is delightfully committed to this belief, taking it very seriously, to the point of overriding all reason. Which makes it seem utterly natural when Terrence agrees to do a pastlife regression at the party in an attempt to salvage his career. It all goes sideways, unmasking Terrence as the powerhungry, callow jerk he is.

Satirical, superbly written and imaginative, PAST LIFE is essentially a story of a comeuppance, of someone whose karmic debt is finally paid. It has fun with the idea of past lives, particularly as how it has entered popular culture and detached itself from its complex religious origins. It imagines a world where we can't escape our past actions or old relationships, which bubble up to have serious social consequences and clearly will haunt us into the future, well beyond our current incarnations, keeping us tethered in a sometimes toxic cycle.