“Thou shalt not covet.”
This is the quote, recognizable to those familiar with the Ten Commandments and other self-help manuals, that opens Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love. A key figure of the Korean New Wave and a former novelist who understands the power
of both formalism and content (his 1999 breakthrough movie Peppermint Candy told its story backwards), Director Lee has been upfront about this movie’s origin story partially coming from a potential group-sourced redo of The Dekalog; it even includes a dedication to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s extraordinary take on Moses’s biblical mandates at the end. Envy has been a constant in his movies in one form or another since the jump, however, as has rage and class-consciousness. You could apply that divine disclaimer to almost all of his work.
That these four words kick off what is possibly Lee’s strongest film to date — and arguably the best movie of the year, even when you consider that 2026 has gifted us with an unabashed abundance of great work — is still an effective way to prime the pump. A tragedy of manners about two couples from the same nation yet vastly different worlds, this is the kind of portrait of haves and have-nots that runs on the friction created by wanting the lives of others. Jealousy is its middle name, to paraphrase the title of a movie from one of the director’s personal friends and peers.
But Possible Love is the sort of singularly rich, overflowing, evocative drama that covers an entire spectrum of emotions, running the gamut from bliss to bad behavior. Even longtime fans of the world-cinema legend may be taken aback by what he’s doing here, and how deftly he’s doing it. Having won the Jury Prize at Venice and wowed audiences at other fall festivals, Lee’s remarkably close-to-perfect film drops on Netflix (starting November 6) after what’s supposed to be a brief theatrical run. Hopefully, the streamer will keep this in theaters even after it comes to an app near you — like The Odyssey and You Can See Everything, this is the type of awe-inspiring, gasp-inducing movie that works extremely well with a crowd, even if it doesn’t feature wooden horses or bad egg preparation.
Possible Love actually shares a few things in common with Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s pop-doc phenomena, from the way it revolves around social cues and secondary agendas to a serious questioning of nonfiction-filmmaking ethics. Ye-ji (Parasite‘s Cho Yeo-jeong) is a would-be documentarian, keen to do some sort of deep dive into the ins and outs of modern labor. She’s showed up at a funeral for a factory worker, who took his own life after losing his job. A couple catches her eye. They’re fighting over whether or not the husband should be downing so much soju at a sorrowful event like this. When the man sees Ye-ji filming them, he reads her the riot act. The wife tries to smooth things out. The camera is turned off. But Ye-ji’s curiosity is piqued.
The man is Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu, the star of Peppermint Candy). He was a colleague of the recently deceased, and had also been laid off after a general strike turned into a state-sanctioned bloodbath. (Lee and his cowriter Oh Jung-mi, who worked together on his previous film Burning, have mined details from the real-life 2009 SsangYong Motor Company strike, which ended in police officers beating workers and fellow protesters en masse.) Even before his backstory is filled in, via flashbacks and passing mentions of his involvement with the labor dispute, you can feel the PTSD and peculiar sense of detachment radiating off of him.
The woman is Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), an understanding spouse who is clearly familiar with her husband’s moods. Going outside after the incident for a smoke, she loses her wedding ring in the parking lot. When a tall, handsome stranger offers to help her find the missing jewelry-slash-metaphor, we meet the fourth corner of Possible Love‘s central quartet: Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). He’s the sort of casually rich person who could recite the definitions of entitlement and privilege without grasping how such concepts might be relevant to his life. Sang-woo is also married to Ye-ji, who’s taken an interest in these two people from the other side of the socioeconomic tracks. Specifically, she thinks Ho-seok would be the perfect subject for her film. By befriending Mi-ok, the documentarian thinks she can get the reluctant participant to sit for an interview. She begins cozying up to this lower-middle-class woman, who enjoys the unexpected company a bit too much. And this is where the slow-burning fuse is first lit for what will be a series of small and seismic detonations.
Every single performance here feels in sync with Lee’s deceptively simple style of storytelling — there’s a favoring of quiet turning points over underlining talking points, a way of stripping things away in scenes to emphasize glances and quiet reactions, a seeding of small details that pay off or provide echoes later on. You may want to pin Mi-ok’s childhood anecdote about her mother’s job washing cars. Ditto a flashback involving the teenage Mi-ok and Ho-seok having a memorable evening under a full moon. Having a youngster observing adults at their worst, or most contradictory, might register as a cliché, until child actor Jung Seol reveals the middle-class couple’s son to be more of a silent, socially awkward presence on the periphery. His facial twitches speak louder than words.
But it’s worth singling out Jeon Do-yeon, who gives you a woman so tipsy on the glow of aristocratic attention that she’s risks becoming punch-drunk on the delusion she can become one of them. Her performance provides the conscience, the sense of hope, and eventually woundedness that makes this film so devastating. Grace notes and telling throwaway gestures are abound when she’s onscreen. And it’s Mi-ok’s relationship with this filmmaker, herself intoxicated over the idea that this emotionally scarred factory worker is her ticket to cinéma vérité success, that’s at the heart of Possible Love. The character is not above asking inappropriate questions like how much an expensive shirt costs, signaling a sort of vulgar fixation on money. But she’s also willing to turn that exchange around by telling Ye-ji that she might not want to wear fancy outfits while trying to win the trust of unemployed workers. Even a so-called rube knows that.
The simmering tension between someone so thirsty for “the good life” rather than a hardscrabble one, and someone so desperate to make her documentary dreams come true — never mind that she’s exploiting her subjects and fooling herself; Sang-woo declares his wife is “doing great Method acting” by pretending she and Mi-ok are on equal footing — lets both these actors cook like Michelin-star-winning chefs. Throw in Sul Kyung-yu’s take on someone left adrift without solidarity from his “brothers” at work and Zo In-sung serving up prime One-percenter obliviousness, and you are left wondering when this timebomb will go off. The answer comes when the four of them and the boy go to Sang-woo’s posh summer house for the weekend, and everything finally boils over. What little boundaries were there are obliterated. Everyone has their reasons. Nobody gets what they want.
Well, almost nobody. Lee Chang-dong has delivered a deadpan satire, an astute series of character studies, a sturdy social drama, and even a pitiless self-critique. (Ye-ji’s surname is Lee, the same handle as the person behind the IRL camera.) It’s all of the things the South Korean auteur has specialized in for decades, somehow seamlessly combined to be more than the sum of its parts. Very few directors are working at this level of layering. Thou shalt not covet his gifts, fellow filmmakers.
Then he drops in an ironic yet sublime coda that reminds you that there’s not just a master calling the shots, but a hardcore humanist as well. For a long time during Possible Love, you may wonder why such a caustic, occasionally righteous, and often enraged tale — don’t let the placid surfaces fool you — would be given this brow-furrowing title. The ending answers that question in the most offhanded, yet pitch-perfect way imaginable. And you, the viewer, are reminded that it’s still possible to see a movie that makes you feel like you’re a different person than you were three hours ago.
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