Possible Love: Lee Chang-Dong’s sober exploration of economic disparity is filled with quiet revelations

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

A new film from South Korean writer-director Lee Chang-Dong is a genuine event; he has only made seven features since 1997, and it is now eight years since his Haruki Murakami-inspired Burning (2018). But one can see why Lee, who made his name as a novelist, works slowly: his is a densely patterned style of narrative intricacy and psychological insight that enriches what otherwise might have seemed mundane social realist dramas.  

His seventh feature Possible Love is quintessential Lee, with its teasingly gradual revelations about his characters, their relationships and back stories. It also represents a departure in its extensive use of flashbacks, sometimes in the form of news footage. And it shows Lee’s concerns intersecting with other recent Korean cinema. A drama about labour issues and economic disparity, it borders on one side with Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) (Cho Yeo-jeong returns here, again playing a woman of privilege) and on the other with No Other Choice (2025), Park Chan-wook’s comedy-thriller about workplace redundancy. But where those films played social crisis as flamboyant black farce, Lee’s sober, detached approach highlights social and psychological effects, showing how the trauma of corporate abuse spreads through families and communities.  

The film’s initial enigma is the taciturn surliness and social isolation of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, from early Lee films Peppermint Candy (1999) and Oasis (2002)). These, we learn, are the scars from losing his skilled job in a factory where the workforce has been reduced prior to a takeover (that contemporary demon, private equity, looms large). Job loss has changed his personality altogether, as shown in a flashback to his teenage courtship of Mi-ok, confidently winning her heart with an exuberant K-pop routine. The local community has also been transformed, the laid-off dubbed ‘the Dead’ while those still in work are ‘the Living’; this is effectively a ghost story, in which the Living simply cannot see social phantoms like Ho-seok. 

Hopes of new visibility for him and Mi-ok (a terrific, ever-shifting performance by Jeon Do-yeon, from Lee’s Secret Sunshine (2007)) comes when Ye-ji arrives to make a documentary about labour issues. She decides that Mi-ok and Ho-seok, if only he’ll open up, will be the heart of her film. Ye-ji is well-meaning, but blinkered. Becoming Mi-ok’s new best friend, she abandons professional detachment and critical discernment. Married to wealthy speculator Sang-woo, she refuses to let him fund her film, applying instead for public funding – commendable enough, although it’s pointed out that the money might instead have gone to a needier filmmaker. She is also casually insensitive: Mi-ok admires her discreetly impeccable fashion sense, but cautions her that manifest chic might not go down well when filming subjects who are struggling to keep afloat. 

Mi-ok, meanwhile, can’t resist envy – both economic and sexual, given Ye-ji’s marriage to the alpha male who was once known as ‘Dream Lover’ to admiring girls at school. Possible Love is prefaced by the injunction ‘Thou shalt not covet’, and the end credits reference Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog 10 (1989) on this theme – although the narrative parallel is tenuous, and explicitly flagging up the topic only risks limiting the meanings of a considerably more involved narrative web. 

In some respects, Possible Love is not Lee at his subtlest. The long climactic act, as Mi-ok and Ho-seok visit their new friends’ luxurious beachside home, sets up a situation in which conflict and embarrassment are too obviously calculated to burst their banks. And there is excessive bluntness in the depiction of Sang-woo crowing about his latest deal and ignoring his guests to talk on his mobile, an awkward update of the yuppie stereotypes of 80s cinema.  

But Possible Love is dense with revelations about Korean employment practices. While Mi-ok is emboldened to form a union in the small business where she works, Ho-seok, starting a new job, must endure a brusque foreman and the humiliation of reciting a workplace mantra. We also learn about the various layers of betrayal that he has suffered during a strike in which community solidarity has briefly flourished, then been mercilessly dynamited. But a low-key thread offering more implicit resonances involves his young son Cheol, an almost silent onlooker who has clearly inherited his father’s trauma. At school, he is the only child awkwardly out of step in a tightly regimented start-of-term ceremony. But, rather than chronically disadvantaged, it may be that Cheol really portends a new refusenik generation whose rejection of the required moves will win the victory that his father’s generation was denied.  

► Possible Love is in UK cinemas 23 October.