{"id":1047115,"date":"2026-09-06T15:22:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T15:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1047115\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T15:22:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T15:22:20","slug":"possible-love-review-another-masterpiece-from-director-lee-chang-dong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1047115\/","title":{"rendered":"Possible Love Review: Another Masterpiece from Director Lee Chang-dong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema\u2019s most literary auteur (a fiction author himself), Lee Chang-dong\u2019s \u201cPossible Love<\/a>\u201d might be dedicated to the memory of Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s \u201cDekalog 10,\u201d but let\u2019s 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\u2019s dreadful \u201cParallel Tales<\/a>\u201d at Cannes this year this film<\/a> shares nothing in common with the final episode of Kie\u015blowski\u2019s series beyond the biblical commandment that Lee splays on screen at the very start: \u201cThou shalt not covet.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a> \"'The<\/a> <\/p>\n

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\u2019 strike at a major Korean metals factory. Who is coveting what, exactly?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s simple enough to understand what the film\u2019s characters want on the surface \u2014\u00a0or at least that\u2019s 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 \u201cParasite<\/a>\u201d) 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 \u2014\u00a0and all of her creative freedom \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the economic divide, the plucky but sad-eyed Mi-ok (played by \u201cSecret Sunshine\u201d 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 \u201cdead\u201d who lost his job\u00a0and sense of purpose in the mass layoffs at SP two years ago, her taciturn and implosive Ho-seok (\u201cPeppermint Candy\u201d 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\u2019s doc might allow him to process his trauma \u2014\u00a0to stop shuffling around like a zombie and snap back into the man she once fell in love with as a teenage seamstress who didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beyond that simple baseline, the matrix of desire at work in Lee and Oh Jung-mi\u2019s remarkably nuanced script is too slippery to pin down until the movie\u2019s velvet gutpunch of a final scene. Yes, Mi-ok lusts after Ye-ji\u2019s elegant wardrobe and designer handbags, and there\u2019s an unspoken sexual charge in the air whenever she\u2019s 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 \u201cPossible Love\u201d might be content to retrench the divide between Korea\u2019s haves and have-nots.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Lee is perfectly happy to inflame our anger towards the one percent, and the movie\u2019s jagged script \u2014\u00a0first inspired by a similar incident at a massive Korean company more than 10 years ago \u2014\u00a0is at its broadest when poking fun at how blithely Ye-ji inserts herself into Mi-ok and Ho-seok\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the story goes on and Ye-ji convinces Mi-ok and Ho-seok to join them for a weekend at Sang-woo\u2019s luxurious vacation house along the country\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 dignity, as if \u2014\u00a0in a world where labor is increasingly rendered invisible from the people who profit from it \u2014 people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok should feel lucky to be seen at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In contrast to Lee\u2019s monumental and more explosive \u201cBurning<\/a>,\u201d 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\u2019s hard for this comparatively restrained domestic saga to compete with Jeon Jong-seo\u2019s sunset dance along the DMZ, Lee retains his gift for whipping spectacle out of thin air \u2014\u00a0for 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 \u201cPossible Love\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201chouse fairy\u201d \u2014\u00a0a seemingly non-verbal groundskeeper who Sang-woo used to play with when they were kids \u2014\u00a0is conditioned to come running whenever he blows on it. For the most part, however, the distance between the film\u2019s characters is conveyed in subtler terms; in the confidence of Sang-woo\u2019s upright posture, the brittleness of Mi-ok\u2019s wavy hair, and the brusque impenetrability of Ho-seok\u2019s blank stare, which doesn\u2019t suggest the absence of an inner life so much as it betrays the constant struggle to bottle up his demons. He\u2019s a prisoner of the pain that Ye-ji breezily documents like a tourist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The careful attention that Lee pays to his characters\u2019 bodies and how they wear them pays off \u2014\u00a0enormously \u2014 after \u201cPossible Love\u201d relocates to Sang-woo\u2019s summer home for this 164-minute film\u2019s last hour (\u201cThis is like a house from a novel I haven\u2019t read,\u201d Mi-ok gawps over dinner). Between a night of drunken karaoke and a few pre-dawn strolls along the mansion\u2019s private beach, the movie\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Possible\u2018Possible Love\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cPossible Love\u201d takes brilliant \u2014 if unnerving \u2014\u00a0pleasure 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\u2019t naive enough to pretend that its \u201cpoor\u201d characters might ever achieve true equilibrium with its rich ones, nor is it patronizing enough to suggest that there\u2019s some kind of implicit dignity to being exploited by the carelessness of late capitalism. Ho-seok is not a holy sufferer, he\u2019s a profoundly broken and embittered man whose plight speaks to the hopelessness of fighting back against a system that\u2019s designed to trample people like him, and Lee is far more interested in rendering his pain than he is in \u201csolving\u201d it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ultimate power of \u201cPossible Love,\u201d which grows in the mind after it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Slumming it as a documentarian as she builds towards her dream of being a narrative filmmaker (\u201cImagining things is my hobby\u201d 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 \u2014\u00a0the seamlessness of her life has life has made it so that she has to performatively \u201cmethod act\u201d 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\u2019t even see people like Mi-ok and Ho-seok unless she contrives a scenario for them to exist for her camera.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For his part, Sang-woo\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t have to see the world beyond their own wealth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve put into each other. Their lives are principled upon a possible love, because they don\u2019t have the luxury of pretending there\u2019s any other kind. Yes, their history together \u2014\u00a0fleshed out in a series of perfectly modulated flashbacks \u2014\u00a0is 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: A<\/p>\n

\u201cPossible Love\u201d premiered at the 2026 Venice<\/a> Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters on Friday, October 23, and on Netflix on Friday, November 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema\u2019s most literary auteur (a fiction author himself), Lee Chang-dong\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1047116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,1020,53,419160,11853,67,132,68,9176],"class_list":["post-1047115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-possible-love","tag-reviews","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-venice"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117224783781478002","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1047116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1047115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1047115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}