Possible Love

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

POSSIBLE LOVE   ***

Lee Chang-dong

2026

IDEA:  In the wake of mass layoffs and a violent union crackdown at a factory, a wealthy filmmaker decides to make a documentary about the fired workers, her focus being on the traumatized Ho-seok and his wife Mi-ok.

BLURB:  A spiritual companion to Parasite, No Other Choice, and Lee’s own Burning, the epic-length Possible Love is a sobering examination of the intransigent class barriers of late-capitalist South Korea. Lee is operating from sociological scales both wide and intimate, and on tonal registers by turns righteously furious and emotionally ambiguous. The anger comes through, at least initially, on the macro level, in the way Lee chronicles the fallout of SP Heavy Industry’s mass layoffs. The villains are made plain as day — private equity, capitalist greed, anti-labor law enforcement — and the victims are portrayed as socially and psychologically ruined, metaphorically “dead” in Korean employment parlance if not literally so. A scene of fired workers giving testimonies during group therapy has the puncturing realism of documentary. This is apt, because Possible Love is also about documentary filmmaking, with the camera serving as the bridge between the working class and the social elite. The former are watched, represented, objectified; the latter get to do the watching and representing. This hierarchy is staged in microcosm between the film’s two couples, the possibility of exploitation always hovering ominously in the air. Lee never dispels the fear, but he also refuses to make the rich couple monsters; Ye-ji’s documentary might even be conducive to securing unionization and exorcising Ho-seok’s trauma. It’s a shame the moral complexity and incisive social portraiture of Possible Love aren’t expressed through equally compelling visual means, as Lee’s bland, perfunctory shots have the stale look of a soap opera. The richness of the text is usually enough to compensate, as are the performances. As the working-class couple, Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu are pressurized canisters of frustration and resentment. Pointedly, the latter’s belated emotional outpouring is catalyzed by the act of being filmed, but whether he can ever actually be “seen” by the right people is left a disquieting uncertainty.