Venice Review: Possible Love Marks a Triumphant Return for Lee Chang-dong

In a year of unknown quantities at the Venice Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love has delivered the triumph for which fans of the elusive director had been hoping. Lee’s first feature since Burning, a modern masterpiece that blew away the competition in Cannes eight years ago, is another novelistic gem, the kind of richly detailed and intricately scripted yarn in which alluring themes like class, sex, and sociology are always on the table to be picked at. It also bears a much-wider and more-specific political purview than its predecessor, which comes at a cost for its dramatic pull from time to time. Lee’s nevertheless returned with the most substantial film I’ve seen in this year’s competition and one that is easily amongst the best of the year so far. 

The central story follows a creative courting of sorts: that of a happy-go-lucky paper-factory worker named Mi-ok (a phenomenal Jeon Do-yeon, returning to the Lee stable for the first time since Secret Sunshine) and her curiously withdrawn husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), who is still carrying some demons from a recent unsuccessful strike. The courters, as tends to be the case, hail from a higher rung on the social ladder: an earnest filmmaker named Ye-ji (Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong) and her wealthy, fitfully supportive husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), the latter of whom Mi-ok appears to have a bit of a crush on. As it transpires, Ye-ji has been trying to get a documentary about mass layoffs going, but a central subject has so far eluded her—making her discovery of Mi-ok (a woman with an easy smile, an open heart, and a story to tell) appear cosmically aligned, at least in her eyes. 

For the next two hours or so, Lee follows this ethically lopsided friendship through a series of intricately charged meet-dups where, even during an evening drink on the patio or a child’s birthday party, Ye-ji always has her camera at hand—all the better to catch this trusting subject at her most candid. (Lee plays this card so bluntly that it often draws a laugh, until it doesn’t.) That central paradox, of where earnest altruism ends and more insidious things like narrative appropriation and class tourism begins, would have been more than enough to sustain Possible Love, but the film is also determined to tell a wider story about the labor disputes that rocked the country a few years back—one that burrows deep (essentially via Ho-seok’s PTSD) into the toll those events took on the people involved, regardless of what side of the picket line they were on.

Whether Lee has bitten off a little more than his film has time to chew is, I think, a question that requires a second viewing. For now, I can at least say that Possible Love is less allegorical and more didactic than its predecessor but, when everything comes together, can be just as seductive and beguiling. If Burning offered a social allegory wrapped in an elusive thriller, Possible Love could almost be described the other way around. Burning‘s wealthy antagonist (played by a menacingly sleepy Steven Yuen) memorably answered the question of what he did for a living by simply saying “I play,” and there are glimmers of a similarly moneyed brand of nihilism to Sang-woo, a man who rarely puts his phone down at the dinner table and will later explain to Mi-ok and Ho-seok that he used to summon his gardener’s son to play with him by blowing on a whistle his father received in the army. The film reaches the absolute peak of its dramatic powers in a handful of scenes when all four characters come together, and during which the possibility of a violent or erotic end seems equally likely.

Lee (who briefly served as the country’s cultural minister under the progressive president Roh Moo-hyun in the early 2000s) spoke in the lead up to Venice about how his film had been inspired by the South Korean government’s recent crackdown on strikes under the conservative leadership of Yoon Suk-yeol—a story that began in 2022 with freight truckers organizing to protect their baseline minimum wage and reached a climax two years later when Yoon shocked the world by declaring martial law. Through Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s memories, Possible Love contains a number of flashbacks to that time, as well as a couple of present-day scenes in which Ho-seok has a strangely guilt-ridden run-in with an old colleague. In these heightened moments, you can almost sense the presence of Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave—another damning film about the scourge of neoliberal policies in South Korea that was, incidentally, also shot by the great Kim Ji-yong—but Possible Love is a very different kind of film, and for this still-quite-raw subject matter, a more enlightening one too.

Possible Love premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and will enter a limited release on October 23 before streaming on Netflix on November 6.