Lee Chang-dong Returns After Eight Years With 'Possible Love'

Lee Chang-dong's first feature in eight years, Possible Love, premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival as one of the strongest films in this year's competition. The film enters a limited theatrical release on October 23 and streams on Netflix from November 6. It is Lee's follow-up to Burning, which won acclaim at Cannes in 2018 and established the Korean director as one of world cinema's most closely watched auteurs.

The Film Stage's review, originally published as part of 2026 Sundance coverage and designated a Critics' Pick, calls Possible Love "the most substantial film I've seen in this year's competition" and places it "easily amongst the best of the year so far." The critic describes it as "another novelistic gem" — a richly detailed work in which class, sex and sociology are constant themes.

What is the story about?

The plot centers on a paper-factory worker named Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, who returns to Lee's films for the first time since Secret Sunshine. The reviewer calls her performance "phenomenal." Her husband, Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, carries psychological wounds from a failed strike.

The couple meets two people from a higher social rung: a documentary filmmaker named Ye-ji, played by Parasite's Cho Yeo-jeong, and her wealthy husband Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung. Ye-ji wants to make a documentary about mass layoffs but has lacked a central subject. In Mi-ok — "a woman with an easy smile, an open heart, and a story to tell" — she finds one that appears, in her eyes, cosmically aligned.

What does the film examine?

The review identifies the film's central paradox: where earnest altruism ends and "more insidious things like narrative appropriation and class tourism begins." Lee charts the ethically lopsided friendship through charged encounters — an evening drink, a child's birthday party — at which Ye-ji always keeps her camera running to catch her trusting subject at her most candid. Lee plays this device so bluntly that it draws laughs, "until it doesn't."

The film also tells a wider story about labor disputes that rocked South Korea, burrowing through Ho-seok's PTSD into the toll those events took on everyone involved, regardless of which side of the picket line they stood on.

How does it compare to 'Burning'?

The reviewer finds Possible Love "less allegorical and more didactic" than its predecessor, though "just as seductive and beguiling" when everything comes together. If Burning was a social allegory wrapped in a thriller, Possible Love inverts that formula.

Sang-woo carries glimmers of the moneyed nihilism embodied by Steven Yeun's antagonist in Burning, who famously answered the question of what he did for a living by saying "I play." Sang-woo, a man who rarely puts his phone down at the dinner table, tells Mi-ok and Ho-seok he once summoned his gardener's son to play by blowing an army whistle his father received in service.

The film reaches its dramatic peak when all four characters share the screen, in scenes where "the possibility of a violent or erotic end seems equally likely." Whether Lee has taken on more than the film's runtime can absorb, the critic writes, is a question that requires a second viewing.

What inspired the film?

Lee, who briefly served as South Korea's cultural minister under President Roh Moo-hyun in the early 2000s, said in the lead-up to Venice that the film was inspired by a mass layoff at a major Korean company more than a decade ago. The film contains flashbacks to that period through Mi-ok and Ho-seok's memories, plus present-day scenes in which Ho-seok has a guilt-ridden encounter with an old colleague.

The review notes echoes of Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave — another film about neoliberal policy in South Korea, shot by the same cinematographer, Kim Ji-yong — but concludes that Possible Love is "a more enlightening" work on still-raw subject matter. With a Critics' Pick designation and a Netflix platform behind it, the film is positioned to reach the widest audience of Lee's career when it arrives this autumn.