Possible Love (2026)
Chang-dong Lee

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Eight years after Burning (2018) set a record score on Screen International’s Cannes jury grid—one that still stands—Lee Chang-dong returns with a new film of insightfully oriented storytelling and modernized style. With its 164-minute runtime, Possible Love unravels the story behind a laborers’ strike that took place two years ago, where married couple Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu)’s lives changed as a result of the action’s ultimate failure and the police’s brutalization that caused Ho-seok physical and mental trauma. Possible Love weaves the long aftermath of the violent event and its predetermined effect—Ho-seok’s job loss—into a documentary film shoot led by Lee Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), whose camera is committed to uncover the stories of labor struggles that, according to her, are only going to be more common but invisible in the age of AI. Slowly earning Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s trust, Ye-ji then takes the couple and their son to her ultra-wealthy husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung)’s summer resort.

Pursuing the strengths of Lee Chang-dong’s cinematic style, Possible Love narrates lucidly, while always complicating the narrative with the layered perspectives offered by its deep depth of field. The background actors are choreographed in intense actions that effectively construct the abrupt and terrifying atmosphere of organized police brutalization, reminding us of the haunting images of Peppermint Candy (1999) [1]. Other times, the main actors’ meticulous performances express their characters in satisfying and revealing ways: most evident in the part of Lee Ye-ji, whose slight changes of expression—an internal turmoil, composed of a general belief in her own good will, a self-justified exploitative mentality of art-making, and a genuine embarrassment due to her aversion (disguised as incompetence) to understanding the working class—not only ethically stands in for Lee Chang-dong’s prudent and self-reflexive approach to the subject matter, but also provides indispensable depth to the film’s central character Mi-ok [2]. Put differently, the film’s clear focus on Mi-ok—the seemingly always smiling, emotionally outpouring wife of a badly hurt former worker—depends on her psychological interactions with a world foreign but not unknown to her, represented by Ye-ji, to characterize her informed simplicity and mandatory nonchalance. 

In contrast to Ho-seok’s repressed, silent physical journeys where he meets and stalks his former colleagues, the psychological relationship between the two women is what, in my opinion, echoes most strongly with the film’s title, the “possible love”. Instead of the persistent hints and discomfort of a potential affair between Sang-woo and Mi-ok, and Ho-seok’s confession of his struggle with his “lack of love” toward his family as a result of his loss of both trust and confidence (the same word in French, confiance), the collective possible love is the film’s primary and most extensive concern. It is distinguished from desire, responsibility, and egoistic problems, despite being entangled with them, through the film’s portrayal of the always possible and always doomed union between Mi-ok and Ye-ji. Their undeniable bond as women is established by the film’s opening scene, where both are yelled at by Ho-seok at the funeral. As the two talk more on the two sides of the image, they manage their difficult partners on and off dinner tables, and elicit and supply scenarios for Ye-ji’s film with a swiftly collaborative force and tacit mutual understanding. Meanwhile, Mi-ok’s opinion on Ye-ji’s “out-of-place” expensive outfit is answered by an awkward agreement; they watch each other from a distance secretly and guardedly, and they have less and less to say as there is no longer a need to be by themselves. They seem to be more interested in performing friendship than actually practicing it. This very performativity, in turn, testifies to their mutual understanding. Without a word, they build a working alliance where they collaborate on a shared project—to make Ho-seok talk. Their relationship dissolves, rebuilds, and reforms repeatedly throughout the film, and its nuances are communicated through the complex expressions on their faces, staged in both the foreground and the background of the frame. Our perspective floats, although only in the realm precisely calculated by the film, with the film’s smooth digital texture changes between the monitor of Ye-ji’s diegetic camera and Lee Chang-dong’s own images, between her still interview setups and his predominantly slightly shaky handheld. That is why depicting Mi-ok and Ye-ji’s fluctuating relationship is where the film is at its most cinematic. With its relentless shots, the film generously captures the always renewing details of performances and shows us the fragile development of a possible love.

:: Sul Kyung-gu (Ho-seok) et Jeon Do-yeon (Mi-ok) [Pinehouse Film / Anonymous Content / Nowfilm]

However, the film is at times overwhelmingly literary, a trait intrinsic to Lee Chang-dong’s style. Symbolism and repetitions prevail, especially in the already more didactic second half of the film, which appropriates the class critique embodied by a house canonized by Parasite (2019). While staying at Sang-woo’s seaside vacation home—Mi–ok has accepted Ye-ji’s invitation as the last effort to draw out Ho-seok's testimony—Ho-seok finally opens himself up for the interviews, but suffers from panic attacks and extreme emotions while recounting his experience of his friends’ abandonment during the police’s attack, and his distrust toward the union slogan in hindsight. During the stay, Mi-ok and Sang-woo share some flirtatious interactions and a skinny dip, which leads to Mi-ok rejecting Sang-woo’s continuous advances and stopping the filming, taking the family back home. Here, the depth of field is simplified and demoted following a shallow-focused flat close-up shot of the unreservedly kind and welcoming smile of Sang-woo’s housekeeper against the car window when the family drives in.

When Sang-woo introduces the guests to the living room, we see the housekeeper in the background, rigidly staged outside the window. Sang-woo blows a whistle that’s displayed, and we see the entire process of the housekeeper hearing it, running into the house, and waiting for his master’s command. In this case, the background is no longer adding nuance to the information, but is the information that the foreground hinges on. In other words, the dialectic between the background and the foreground that was rewarding in the first half of the film is demolished, replaced here by a single action that unifies the two. A similar logic is deployed when the adults have a drunken karaoke night in the basement, as we follow the son Cheol to discover the scene. After going down the stairs, the camera stops and watches Cheol walk up to the room in the distance, only later to cut to the close-up of him against the door crack. This sudden pause in the camera makes the depth of the space seem to be all that this shot communicates, which is redundant because the tracking of Cheol from upstairs has tirelessly served the same purpose. Lastly, again, when the camera follows Mi-ok and finds hungover Ho-seok losing his sanity in the distance, the film cuts to a closer shot of this. Deep focus as a device for complexity is abandoned. The wide shots become transitions that take us from the characters’ perspectives to an omniscient, clearer camera angle. In this series of developments, it is not the film’s efficiency or intelligibility that is failing—they remain as strong as before—but its character dynamics, which are reduced by the elimination of contrast and tension in a single frame and the exchange for a more noticeably detached camera.

Correspondingly, the film relies on repeated visual symbolism that renders the film more didactic, as it derives meanings rather than presents meanings, a tendency quite contradictory to Lee Chang-dong’s signature deep focus. I call it literary not because it’s similar to literature, but because the intention is to fit audiovisual ideas neatly into boxes of written meaning and analysis. Mi-ok sees her son Cheol play with the car-washing hose with the housekeeper; a ray of sunshine creates a rainbow with the water, an image we’ve seen when Mi-ok tells her story to Ye-ji in their first interview: as a kid she finds the water and rainbow to be beautiful, but her mom, doing car washing at the time, angrily takes the hose away and scolds her. Similarly, the opening shot is repeated, this time Sang-woo kneeling down to tie Cheol’s shoes before the family leaves. After the three males (the father, the son, and Sang-woo) demonstrate repeatedly the link between taekwondo and their masculinity and ego, we definitely understand better that’s it’s a privilege to have the male ego unhurt, and that it’s certainly a power play for Sang-woo to reinforce this after being rejected by Mi-ok. The cycle is finally complete, as Cheol takes away Sang-woo’s whistle, an act of love toward the housekeeper friend whom he identifies with and a child’s way to set him free. These are just a few of the film’s wide yet meaningful uses of symbolism and other narrative devices. Although they ground the perception of the film, facilitating some sort of resolution, there are underlying limits to this literary and repetitive approach: not only does the film leave very little room for interpretation, but it also betrays its virtue of cautiousness suggested by its very title. In other words, the way the film perfectly comes full circle is rather incompatible with its indefinite quality and intellect.

The film ends with Mi-ok’s unsent picture of the full moon to Ye-ji; earlier, the two shared their working experience related to the full moon, and we as the audience almost hope they resonate authentically and meaningfully. Only a few minutes prior, I hear laughter and brief applause in the auditorium as Sang-woo pisses alongside a drunk Ho-seok into the bathtub. It is an ambiguously ironic episode where the film leverages the oppressive stress and helpless confusion, brilliantly performed by Sul Kyung-gu, to provoke our yearning for warmth and friendship, albeit fleetingly. As the film retreats gradually from letting us see to telling us what to see, it appears less and less convinced of the possibility of this love.
 

:: (Left to right) Zo In-sung (sang-woo), Cho Yeo-jeong (Ye-ji), Jeon Do-yeon (Mi-ok) et Sul Kyung-gu (Ho-seok)
[Pinehouse Film / Anonymous Content / Nowfilm]

Possible love is abstract; it lacks material function in all characters’ lives, yet it is also the connecting tissue of society, the first to be punished and obliterated. A woman shares in group therapy that she did not imagine the happiness she felt being with others during the strike, and the consequence she suffers now made her think that “we were not supposed to be happy like that; we are being punished, since then, by the happiness on that day.” Ye-ji, recalling her hotel in Qatar—an honest recollection for her but an ironic example of elite hospitality—rationalizes her motivation for the project to bear witness to the disappearance of the elephant in the room—the laborers. The invisibility of labor is the condition of a consumable, therefore profitable product, she points out, and her project seeks to see them.

In this carefully tangled film, however, we learn that seeing can be a step toward, but does not amount to, loving. The absence of love and all it encompasses—happiness, empathy, justice, and care—is hence the circulating source and consequence of a shared societal deadlock. Here, Lee Chang-dong’s candid condemnation of capitalism places the structural burden onto the shoulders of the characters, which is humane by its focus, but at the same time isolates and benefits from their particularities. The characters have failed, ultimately, in sustaining their possible love for others, but their agency is restrained from the beginning, because they turn out to be contrived instruments of maximized literary effects. How different would the story be if Mi-ok’s working-class mother was involved, or if Cheol had a friend? The disappointment at the impossibility of love is predetermined, made evident by the director's self-critical and thoughtful identification with Ye-ji in order to justify his positionality in telling this story. To faithfully chase after this possible love as the film competently leads our way, we find ourselves in a magnificent maze pre-constructed to end in its absence, and realize the film never promised anything but a glimpse of it.

Chuiwen (Wen) Kong is an independent filmmaker and writer. She recently received a Master's in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of British Columbia, where she defended her thesis: a video essay titled "Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy: repetition, gesture, and sentence image in Chinese cinema."

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