Another heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema’s most literary auteur (a fiction author himself), Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love” might be dedicated to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog 10,” but let’s dispel any notion of it being a remake. Conceived independently, and then lumped during pre-production into the same tribute omnibus that kicked off with Asghar Farhadi’s dreadful “Parallel Tales” at Cannes this year this film shares nothing in common with the final episode of Kieślowski’s series beyond the biblical commandment that Lee splays on screen at the very start: “Thou shalt not covet.”
And even then, the evidence of that instruction proves elusive in this sprawling drama about two very different couples who are brought together by the violent suppression of a workers’ strike at a major Korean metals factory. Who is coveting what, exactly?
It’s simple enough to understand what the film’s characters want on the surface — or at least that’s true of its women. A casually rich dilettante whose pale skin glows with the same lustrousness as her salon-perfect bob, first-time director Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong, similarly cast as the rich mom in “Parasite”) hopes to make a documentary about the declining state of labor across South Korea, with a particular focus on the recent unrest at a business called SP Heavy Industries. Although we see Ye-ji pitching the project to a grant board of some kind, the presumption is that most of her funding — and all of her creative freedom — has been provided by her imperiously chiseled husband Sang-woo (Lee newcomer Zo In-sung), a trust fund type who appears to enjoy a rather frictionless existence.
On the other side of the economic divide, the plucky but sad-eyed Mi-ok (played by “Secret Sunshine” actress Jeon Do-yeon, who delivers another once-a-century performance less than 20 years since her first collaboration with Lee) is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to bring her husband back to life. One of the “dead” who lost his job and sense of purpose in the mass layoffs at SP two years ago, her taciturn and implosive Ho-seok (“Peppermint Candy” star Sul Kyung-gu) has been a shell of himself since being injured amid the crackdown that ended the ensuing strike, and Mi-ok hopes that participating in Ye-ji’s doc might allow him to process his trauma — to stop shuffling around like a zombie and snap back into the man she once fell in love with as a teenage seamstress who didn’t have any better options. That he might become a more present father to their young son Cheol, whose current rudderlessness is best expressed by his abject incompetence at Taekwondo.
Beyond that simple baseline, the matrix of desire at work in Lee and Oh Jung-mi’s remarkably nuanced script is too slippery to pin down until the movie’s velvet gutpunch of a final scene. Yes, Mi-ok lusts after Ye-ji’s elegant wardrobe and designer handbags, and there’s an unspoken sexual charge in the air whenever she’s alone with Sang-woo (a charge that eventually sets fire to an unforgettable pre-dawn sequence on a private beach in the third act). But it would be unwisely reductive to conclude that the working-class woman is jealous of her hyper-affluent new bestie, just as it would be unhelpfully rash to assume that envy plays a more pivotal role in this story than resentment, or that a film as mottled and probing as “Possible Love” might be content to retrench the divide between Korea’s haves and have-nots.
Lee is perfectly happy to inflame our anger towards the one percent, and the movie’s jagged script — first inspired by a similar incident at a massive Korean company more than 10 years ago — is at its broadest when poking fun at how blithely Ye-ji inserts herself into Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s blue-collar world. She wants to be a fly on the wall in their downtrodden factory town, but the pampered documentarian stands out like a Maybach at a monastery; despite growing up without a silver spoon in her mouth, she rages at her inability to code-switch back to a lower rung on the financial ladder.
As the story goes on and Ye-ji convinces Mi-ok and Ho-seok to join them for a weekend at Sang-woo’s luxurious vacation house along the country’s western coast (all the better to entrap the couple on her turf where she can film them at all hours of the day), Lee finds a devious variety of ways to weaponize the running visual gag in which an intimate scene pans over to find Ye-ji hiding in the corner with her camera. It’s admirable that she wants to highlight how workers are being left behind as the ownership class automates their businesses in order to hoard their wealth, but Ye-ji fails to recognize the many condescending ways that she infringes upon her subjects’ dignity, as if — in a world where labor is increasingly rendered invisible from the people who profit from it — people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok should feel lucky to be seen at all.
In contrast to Lee’s monumental and more explosive “Burning,” the story he tells here builds on an instance of terrible violence rather than building to it, but his latest film simmers to a boil at a similar clip, and likewise alternates long dialogue scenes with indelible moments of visual acuity. While it’s hard for this comparatively restrained domestic saga to compete with Jeon Jong-seo’s sunset dance along the DMZ, Lee retains his gift for whipping spectacle out of thin air — for infusing something as routine as a car ride home or a quick dip in the ocean with an overwhelming degree of silent pathos. Every moment in “Possible Love” crackles like a wicked symphony of striated socioeconomic abrasion; every gesture, comment, and detail sharpens the strange geometry that brings these people closer together at the same time as it deepens the divides that will ultimately keep them apart.
Sometimes, in a handful of judiciously deployed moments, that geometry is expressed in skin-crawling fashion. Case in point: Sang-woo keeps an antique whistle on the living room mantle of his summer palace, and the resident “house fairy” — a seemingly non-verbal groundskeeper who Sang-woo used to play with when they were kids — is conditioned to come running whenever he blows on it. For the most part, however, the distance between the film’s characters is conveyed in subtler terms; in the confidence of Sang-woo’s upright posture, the brittleness of Mi-ok’s wavy hair, and the brusque impenetrability of Ho-seok’s blank stare, which doesn’t suggest the absence of an inner life so much as it betrays the constant struggle to bottle up his demons. He’s a prisoner of the pain that Ye-ji breezily documents like a tourist.
The careful attention that Lee pays to his characters’ bodies and how they wear them pays off — enormously — after “Possible Love” relocates to Sang-woo’s summer home for this 164-minute film’s last hour (“This is like a house from a novel I haven’t read,” Mi-ok gawps over dinner). Between a night of drunken karaoke and a few pre-dawn strolls along the mansion’s private beach, the movie’s financially driven exploration of freedom and power begin to assume a more physical dimension, a transition which threatens to confuse the dynamics that have otherwise tethered everyone to their roles; this is where Jeon seizes control, her raw and marbled performance reaching a state of self-preservation so primal that it renders the rest of the characters senseless.
“Possible Love” takes brilliant — if unnerving — pleasure in leveling the playing field between its two couples, but those shifty indulgences are too freighted with reality to feel like wish fulfillment. The film isn’t naive enough to pretend that its “poor” characters might ever achieve true equilibrium with its rich ones, nor is it patronizing enough to suggest that there’s some kind of implicit dignity to being exploited by the carelessness of late capitalism. Ho-seok is not a holy sufferer, he’s a profoundly broken and embittered man whose plight speaks to the hopelessness of fighting back against a system that’s designed to trample people like him, and Lee is far more interested in rendering his pain than he is in “solving” it.
The ultimate power of “Possible Love,” which grows in the mind after it’s over (and greatly rewards any repeat viewings), is rooted in neither wanton despair nor false optimism. Despite being steeped in the sadness and frustration of the working class, Lee’s drama uses its film-within-a-film construct to refract the moral valences of labor through the prism of what people actually earn through their work.
Slumming it as a documentarian as she builds towards her dream of being a narrative filmmaker (“Imagining things is my hobby” is maybe not what you want to hear from the person directing a documentary about your life), Ye-ji is a victim of her own second-hand affluence — the seamlessness of her life has life has made it so that she has to performatively “method act” in order to get close to her subjects and shoot anything real. Her observational technique is a parody of the invisible labor that she laments noticing the first time during a trip to a luxurious Qattari hotel, but she can’t even see people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok unless she contrives a scenario for them to exist for her camera.
For his part, Sang-woo’s work is so frictionless that he can buy and sell entire companies from his laptop while sipping a latte, and his marriage to Ye-ji feels like it’s laminated in plastic. They passively snipe at each other in short bursts so as not to get any dirt on the bedsheets, and relegate all of their latent desires to the blind spots that rich people create so that they don’t have to see the world beyond their own wealth.
By contrast, Mi-ok and Ho-seok have no choice but to confront the hardships that have been visited upon them, and to want for things so badly they can never lose sight of the work they’ve put into each other. Their lives are principled upon a possible love, because they don’t have the luxury of pretending there’s any other kind. Yes, their history together — fleshed out in a series of perfectly modulated flashbacks — is clumsy and imperfect, and their financial prospects for the future are tenuous at best, but they will never have to covet what this world still offers to people for free. Mi-ok and Ho-seok have always felt as if the moon shined only for them at night, and the final moments of this gently shattering and astonishingly well-shaded drama exalt in the freedom they give to each other by saving its glow for themselves.
Grade: A
“Possible Love” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters on Friday, October 23, and on Netflix on Friday, November 6.