Possible Love

As recent exports can attest — see Parasite, Squid Game, and last year’s No Other Choice — the economic disparities between the super-rich and the rest of us is a prevailing concern among Korea’s leading filmmakers. In his first film since 2018’s Burning (itself a rumination on the wealth divide), director Lee Chang-dong explores the questionable practices of a wealthy filmmaker (Cho Yeo-jeong) who turns her documentary camera on the workers laid off following a bitter strike. The angry, taciturn Ho-seok (Sul Kyun-gu) becomes a potential subject, and our on-screen documentarian becomes friendly with his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), but does empathy have its limits?

An early title card acknowledges Kieslowski’s Dekalog 10 (“Thou shalt not covet…”) as an inspiration, and the Polish master would surely have appreciated Lee’s sly, sardonic take on documentary ethics and class struggle in our late-capitalist era. But it’s in the film’s superbly orchestrated third act — when the satire becomes freighted with unsettling animosity — that things really get interesting.

As recent exports can attest — see Parasite, Squid Game, and last year’s No Other Choice — the economic disparities between the super-rich and the rest of us is a prevailing concern among Korea’s leading filmmakers. In his first film since 2018’s Burning (itself a rumination on the wealth divide), director Lee Chang-dong explores the questionable practices of a wealthy filmmaker (Cho Yeo-jeong) who turns her documentary camera on the workers laid off following a bitter strike. The angry, taciturn Ho-seok (Sul Kyun-gu) becomes a potential subject, and our on-screen documentarian becomes friendly with his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), but does empathy have its limits?

An early title card acknowledges Kieslowski’s Dekalog 10 (“Thou shalt not covet…”) as an inspiration, and the Polish master would surely have appreciated Lee’s sly, sardonic take on documentary ethics and class struggle in our late-capitalist era. But it’s in the film’s superbly orchestrated third act — when the satire becomes freighted with unsettling animosity — that things really get interesting.

Another heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema’s most literary auteur… 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.

Grade A, David Ehrlich, Indiewire

One of the best films of 2026… a complex character study of how imbalanced dynamics can impact human connection.

Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com

Wonderfully rich and deep… This shimmering, sonorous work, from one of our greatest living directors, moves through the peculiar landscapes of human interaction with certainty, eccentricity and grace, alighting on a generous if rueful conclusion.

Jessica Kiang, Variety