Possible Love

OVERVIEW

When is genuine love possible in a world divided by class? And can we really connect with others when envy makes their lives look like the answer to what ours is missing? Lee Chang-dong turns those questions into the foundation of Possible Love and follows two couples brought together by a documentary about a factory layoff. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) are still carrying the consequences of losing their livelihood when Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker, becomes fascinated by their circumstances and decides she wants them at the center of her next project. She and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), meanwhile, belong to a world of comfort and wealth completely different from theirs. As the four spend more time together, the film develops an almost morbid fascination with what they begin to want from each other’s lives.

BACKGROUND

Curiously enough, the origins of Possible Love come from Lee Chang-dong’s own fascination with the 2009 SsangYong Motor strike, whose mass layoffs and violent police crackdown became one of South Korea’s most notorious labor conflicts. He wanted to respond to what had happened, but began questioning whether he had the right to turn the suffering of those workers into fiction. The project remained dormant until co-writer Oh Jung-mi suggested that Lee add a filmmaker to the story, making the film not only about the workers but, in a way, about his own drive to capture other people’s misfortunes. The film also arrives eight years after Burning, at a moment when job insecurity has become a reality for a much wider group of people. It was originally planned as a theatrical release, but a downturn in the Korean film industry eventually led Lee to Netflix, which, according to him, gave him almost complete creative freedom.

THE REVIEW

Let’s not get into the irony of a mega corporation financing a film this critical of capitalism. Far more interesting is how Lee explores his ideas, finding complex ways to test the morality of the rich and privileged while also showing how the less privileged can internalize, reproduce, and even covet the same structures that diminish them. It all forms a web of repressed envy. Mi-ok looks toward Ye-ji and Sang-woo’s wealth and freedom. Ho-seok’s anger grows from the humiliation of what he lost and the life he feels was unfairly taken from him. Sang-woo’s sense of possession and entitlement shows up in all his interactions, whether with his wife or guests, but especially in how he treats Min-sik, his childhood friend who now works as his caretaker. And finally, Ye-ji is fascinated by Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s hardship, seeing their suffering as fertile ground for her next film.

Ye-ji receives the most attention, since Lee also uses her to question his own role as a filmmaker. Her documentary reflects what she considers worth filming, which means that repetitive labor, despite being central to the workers’ lives, is quickly dismissed as too boring. She then crosses another line when she stops simply observing and encourages Mi-ok to stand up at work and organize a union. Ye-ji believes so strongly in the nobility of what she is doing that she is genuinely surprised when Sang-woo describes it as a form of method acting. That contradiction defines much of her relationship with Mi-ok and Ho-seok. She may care about them and believe the friendship is real, but she and Sang-woo are always one drive away from their luxury beach house, free to get close to that life and then move on to whatever hobby comes next.

The film is packed with similar ideas about class, labor, envy, art, and exploitation, and each could earn a dedicated paragraph here. At two hours and forty-five minutes, however, it becomes laborious because Lee insists on giving each of them several examples. Like The Secret Agent last year, it raises the question of whether twenty variations of the same argument were really necessary when half might have been more effective, and like All of a Sudden this year, that repetition weighs especially heavily on the first half, which moves at a glacial pace with many scenes restating ideas the film has already made clear. You can call it patient cinema, but more often than not, Possible Love is simply making its ideas denser than they need to be.

That insistence on restating ideas becomes even more unnecessary when Kim Ji-yong’s cinematography already conveys so much through its mise-en-scène. Mi-ok and Sang-woo are separated across a street. Mi-ok briefly seems free while walking alone in the street before Ho-seok’s car appears looming behind her. At the beach house, large open spaces constantly keep people together while always maintaining the distance between them. Even the jokes are rich with ideas, including the ridiculous piss competition between Sang-woo and Ho-seok. The four performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong, whose characters spend much of the film studying one another before realizing what that attention reveals about themselves.

Everything finally comes together in the last hour, when the two families gather at Sang-woo and Ye-ji’s beach house and the film moves through each of their desires, revealing how little satisfaction any of them actually brings. The exception is Cheol, Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s young son, almost invisible to the family and often to the viewer, yet always quietly observing what happens around him. He is the only character who shows genuine solidarity, ironically by taking something that belongs to someone else: the whistle Sang-woo blows whenever he wants Min-sik to come running. Mi-ok scolds him for stealing another person’s property, missing the much uglier ownership the whistle enforces. In a film filled with people coveting what others have, the one act of taking without wanting to possess proves that yes, love is possible.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Possible Love is a rich exploration of class, exploitation, and the human tendency to look at someone else’s life as the answer to our own dissatisfaction. Like Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, it demands patience and takes its time reaching its conclusions, but too much of that time is spent repeating ideas that were already clear, making the first half considerably more laborious than necessary. It may not provoke the same gut-punch reaction as Burning, but when Lee finally allows his themes to collide through the characters rather than explaining them individually, Possible Love becomes as thoughtful and compassionate as its title promises.

At a glance

3.5/5

“REWARDING”

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Where to watch

📅Coming soonNov 6, 2026

Where to watch

📅Coming soon

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