Rare is the film that earnestly inspires you to hold your loved ones closer. Rarer still is the film that does so while making room for the innumerable conflicts of our contemporary lives. Nigh impossible is the film that does all that and doubles as an artistic self-immolation, like those of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon or Godard’s Weekend. Lee Chang-dong has, miraculously, accomplished all this and more with Possible Love.
The film pits two couples against one another to examine the ever-widening fault lines between the working class and the elite, but where many arthouse dramas (like Mungiu’s underwhelming Palme-winner Fjord) would settle for pat contrasts, Lee digs into the dark particulars of his characters. On one hand, we have Ho-seok and Mi-ok, the husband and wife who get by on the latter’s meager salary since Ho-seok was, euphemistically, laid off from his job as a welder at a large manufacturing corporation two years ago. On the other, we have Ye-ji and Sang-woo, an exorbitantly wealthy pair with time and cash to burn. Ye-ji is a documentary filmmaker, and she’s targeted Ho-seok because of the circumstances surrounding his firing.
The title and an opening card with the words THOU SHALT NOT COVET over black suggest a tale of simple infidelity between the pair; what transpires instead is a rich and complicated modern fable (knowingly) in the spirit of Kieslowski’s Dekalog. Burning, Lee’s first digital feature, is a powerful gateway drug into his world, but it suggests a deviation from Lee’s strengths as both writer and director. Possible Love finds Lee internalizing some of the lessons the transition to digital taught him while returning to the sturdy storytelling instincts of his early 2000s era, and it’s something of a relief for this writer to report that Lee has not lost his touch as a dramatist.
He has, in fact, only gotten sharper. Possible Love unfurls like a riptide to Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, which opens with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and utilizes as its linchpin the emotional life of a young photographer: this film opens with a funeral, ends with a wedding (if you squint hard enough), and locates its greatest resonance in the eyes of an autistic boy who can see clearly the folly of the neurotypical adults in his life. Like Yi Yi, Possible Love carves complete lives out of small gestures and lifts the weight of entire economic systems in throwaway lines, but Lee also ventures out where Yang did not. He dares to critique the social-realist mode of filmmaking, and his own role in it, while reminding us of its inherent value.
Early in the film, Ye-ji and Mi-ok sit down for coffee. They talk about their lives and loves frankly, and Mi-ok emerges as quite a compelling raconteur. Ye-ji gets so excited that she pulls out her camera to have Mi-ok repeat her story. It’s the first of many intrusions the camera makes on Mi-ok’s life, but, being a film director, Ye-ji believes these intrusions are worthwhile: “I’ll make sure their voices are heard,” she says to a boardroom of potential financiers. She’s a filmmaker focusing on laborers and outsiders; i.e., the types of characters Lee typically trains his eye on. The funding board gives her a hard time about her chosen subject, saying her focus on human labor is outdated in an economy rapidly moving toward complete automation. She insists otherwise. Ye-ji’s family name? Lee.
Elsewhere in the film, Sang-woo drives Mi-ok to set, and they discuss the circumstances of the film’s production. “What’s an independent film independent of?” Mi-ok asks. Throughout Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong plants mines to blow up our naïve understanding of the independent film industrial complex — the compromises, the awkwardness, and the moral failures. Yet, while doing so, he still stands firmly on the side of the working family he’s depicting. We in the audience are given access to their emotional lives in ways the viewers of Ye-ji’s film would not. Lee is a filmmaker who recognizes the limits of the very films he makes, yet he can’t help but make an iron-clad argument in favor of those films because of his choices as director. He does what others in this mode can’t — or refuse—to do: he lets us live with his characters.
When Mi-ok tells tales of her childhood, for example, Lee deploys conventional flashbacks (the first time he’s done so in his career). We go with Mi-ok into her past, and it’s a brilliant use of a device that could otherwise read as trite. Or when the documentary crew invades Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s home, Lee puts us in the closet with their son Cheoi. Very nearly adopting Cheoi’s POV, the documentary’s DP tries to photograph him, but Cheoi slams the door shut. We briefly stay with Cheoi in the darkness he creates. Lee has such a firm grasp of the visual storytelling grammar, but he doesn’t make a show of his mastery: the shining of a full moon, the appearance of a rainbow in a shower of mist — his images cut through the cacophony of post-modernity and bring us back, hushed, to an understanding of what it means to be human. It takes a level of maturity most artists don’t even dream of, let alone achieve, to be able to hold contradictions like the ones Lee holds in Possible Love.
Possible Love is not Lee’s masterpiece (that would be Oasis), but it is his most cumulative work: it incorporates Poetry’s compassionate gaze, a towering central performance from Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-yeon, and, most importantly, picks up the pieces where Burning’s rage against tech oligarchy and post-globalization malaise failed. As with most Lee films, we’ll be living with its mysteries for some time — this review just scratches the surface of what makes Possible Love so great. Tear the awesome Oak down to its roots, however, and it’s about one thing we can all understand: the heart is big, and it wants a lot. Like U2 dropping their album Songs of Innocence on every Apple device in the world, this writer hopes that Possible Love will play automatically when each Netflix member logs in on November 6. Increasingly, it’s easy to skew nihilistic about the state of cinema. A few times a year, though, something can still remind us why we love the art form so much. Possible Love is one such miraculous movie.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 5.
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