Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love' Opens in Theaters October 23

Netflix releases Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" in select theaters on Friday, October 23, with streaming to follow on November 6. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where critics met it with rave reviews, and it now enters the awards season as one of the streamer's Oscar hopes.

Lee, the director of "Burning," uses the production of a fictional documentary inside his film to explore class divides. Two families from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum gradually begin to covet each other's lives. The premise is very loosely inspired by a segment of Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Dekalog," the Polish director's ten-part television cycle, though Lee takes the material in directions that are entirely his own.

Who's in the cast, and what happens?

Per the official synopsis, "Possible Love" follows "the intertwined relationship of two married couples facing different paths and hidden desires." Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, lives quietly with her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and their young son Cheol. A funeral brings them into the orbit of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker chronicling laid-off workers, and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) — a couple whose affluent lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to their own.

The mechanism of the plot is the camera itself. When Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, she grows close to Ye-ji and finds herself uneasily drawn to the unreadable Sang-woo. As the synopsis puts it: "As their worlds collide, fractures begin to appear in their daily existence."

What did critics say in Venice?

IndieWire's David Ehrlich hailed the film as a "masterpiece," noting that Lee uses his literary sensibilities to tell a story subtler than his past works, but no less devastating.

"In contrast to Lee's monumental and more explosive 'Burning,' the story he tells here builds on an instance of terrible violence rather than building to it, but his latest film simmers to a boil at a similar clip, and likewise alternates long dialogue scenes with indelible moments of visual acuity," Ehrlich wrote.

He continued: "While it's hard for this comparatively restrained domestic saga to compete with Jeon Jong-seo's sunset dance along the DMZ, Lee retains his gift for whipping spectacle out of thin air — for infusing something as routine as a car ride home or a quick dip in the ocean with an overwhelming degree of silent pathos. Every moment in 'Possible Love' crackles like a wicked symphony of striated socioeconomic abrasion; every gesture, comment, and detail sharpens the strange geometry that brings these people closer together at the same time as it deepens the divides that will ultimately keep them apart."

What does this change for moviegoers?

The two-week window between the theatrical release on October 23 and the streaming debut on November 6 gives audiences a straightforward choice: catch it on the big screen during awards season, or wait less than a month for it at home. Either way, the release makes one of Venice's best-reviewed films widely available just as Oscar voters start paying attention. Netflix has released the film's second trailer ahead of the rollout.