Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong‘s new film for Netflix, begins with two marriages that should never have shared a summer. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) works in a mask factory, and her husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) is a welder who lost his job after a strike at his plant was put down by force. Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) makes documentaries, and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) grew up wealthy. A funeral puts the four of them in the same room. Ye-ji leaves it with a project: a film about layoffs, with Mi-ok and Ho-seok as her main subjects.

That arrangement is the engine of the South Korean director’s first film in eight years, a class drama that Netflix produced and is now releasing worldwide. In the official synopsis, Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, grows close to Ye-ji and finds herself drawn to Sang-woo, a man she cannot read. Ye-ji then invites the couple to spend the summer at her husband’s beachfront villa, where, in the production’s own description, long-suppressed desires and class tensions come to the surface. Netflix’s pitch is plainer still: a laid-off worker and his wife cross paths with a documentary filmmaker and her spouse and confront their hidden desires.

Anyone who has followed Korean cinema over the last few years will recognise the shape of it: a struggling household drawn inside a wealthy one. Parasite built its plot on that arrangement, and before it Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid did the same in 1960, with a working woman moving into a middle-class home. The casting makes the Parasite echo hard to miss. Cho Yeo-jeong played the trusting rich mother in Bong Joon-ho‘s film; here she plays the woman who brings the struggling family into her husband’s house, and this time she is the one making the documentary. The music is by Jung Jae-il, who also scored Parasite. In Bong’s film the poor family gets in by deception. In Lee’s, the premise says they are invited, and the invitation is also a request to be filmed.

That request is older than Korean cinema. When Vittorio De Sica made Bicycle Thieves in 1948, he cast a factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, as his jobless father, and the argument over whether the camera serves people like him or simply uses them has followed films about work ever since. Possible Love moves that argument inside the story. Ye-ji is not a cynic in any description of the film; she wants to make a film about layoffs, which is a decent thing to want. What the synopsis sets against her intentions is the imbalance of the arrangement: one couple holds the camera and owns the villa, the other has a lost job, a factory shift and a story worth filming.

Lee has been circling that imbalance for most of his career. He was a novelist and a high school teacher before he directed his first film in his forties, and at the Venice press conference he put it simply: “Since my days writing novels, I’ve kept asking how close I really stood to the people I wrote about.” He added: “That question hasn’t left me.” The story of Possible Love grew out of a real mass layoff at a major Korean conglomerate and spent more than a decade in development. After the festival’s awards he went further than most directors do about their own subject. “I wasn’t sure I had the right to turn their stories into a fictional film and show them to audiences,” he said. “Films can sometimes end up using other people’s suffering for their own purposes.” He wanted, he said, to ask himself and the audience how filmmakers should portray the suffering of others.

Read against those words, Ye-ji looks less like a character the film judges than one it shares a problem with. The premise points to a director putting his own doubt in the hands of someone younger, richer and surer of herself, and then sending her on holiday with the people she is filming.

None of that makes Possible Love a lecture, at least on Lee’s account of it. At the film’s Korean press event in August he described it in other terms. “The movie is literally a story about love,” he said. “It goes beyond romantic love to explore the love people experience throughout their lives, asking what kind of love is possible for us and how we can protect it.” The economic pressure is in the same breath: “As the control of capital over our lives grows stronger, I wondered how we should survive. I believed that what supports our lives during tough times is love between people.” The title, in other words, is a question about which kinds of love can survive that pressure, and the film’s two marriages are where it gets tested.

The cast reads like a map of Lee’s career. Jeon Do-yeon returns to him 19 years after Secret Sunshine, the film that won her the best actress prize at Cannes. Sul Kyung-gu makes his third Lee film, after Peppermint Candy and Oasis, and he has said that the first of them overwhelmed him because he lacked experience at the time, and that over the years he found himself longing for those intense days. Zo In-sung describes Sang-woo as a man who grew up rich and “lacks clear complexes”, adding that “because his flaws are not obvious, his inner thoughts behind his warm exterior are harder to read.” Cho Yeo-jeong said she put all her effort into “truly existing as the character.” Jo Yuri and Choi Min are credited as the young Mi-ok and the young Ho-seok, so the film also reaches back into the couple’s past.

Behind the camera, Lee wrote the screenplay with Oh Jung-mi, his co-writer on Burning, the 2018 film that took the critics’ prize at Cannes and was, until now, his most recent feature. Kim Ji-yong shot it and Kim Da-won edited it. Getting it made was not simple. According to the Korean press, the project struggled to find money during a long slump in the local film industry, and Netflix came in with production support after Lee could not find backers for a theatrical release.

There is something worth noticing in that. A film about who pays for, frames and profits from other people’s hardship exists because the world’s largest streaming service decided to pay for it. That is not a charge against the film or the platform. It is simply the condition under which a story like this one now reaches the most people, and Lee, who has spoken openly about the pandemic emptying cinemas and about wondering whether a film can still connect one person to another, seems unlikely to be unaware of it.

The early reception has been strong. At the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered in competition, the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal gave it the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second-highest honour, behind May El-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown. It also won the FIPRESCI award for the best film in competition. Variety called it a “beautifully mature, quietly colossal relationship drama”; The Hollywood Reporter called it a “quiet powerhouse”. Johnnie To, who sat on the jury, called it Lee’s most mature work. Accepting the prize, Lee said he had made the film “to ask what cinema can do — and what it must do — in an age when work is disappearing”, and that he took the award as a sign that he should keep asking that question. South Korea has since selected it as its submission for best international feature at the 99th Academy Awards. It is not Lee’s first Venice prize: Oasis won him the best director award there in 2002.

What the premise leaves open is the question Ye-ji’s camera keeps asking, and the one Lee says he has never answered for himself. When one couple’s damage becomes another couple’s material, what kind of love is still possible between them, and who gets to decide what that love looks like on screen?

Sul Kyung-gu as Ho-seok in Possible Love. Photo: Joo Jae-bum / Netflix © 2026

Possible Love runs about 164 minutes and is in Korean. Netflix gave it a short theatrical run first, in South Korea from September 23 and in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Japan from October 23. It streams worldwide on Netflix from November 6, 2026.

Is Possible Love based on a true story? Not directly. It is a fiction feature, but Lee has said the story was inspired by a real mass layoff at a major Korean conglomerate. The four leads are Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong, and the film is directed by Lee Chang-dong, the filmmaker behind Burning, Poetry and Secret Sunshine.