‘Possible Love’ movie review: Lee Chang-dong’s exquisitely layered study of covetousness

Thou shalt not covet… except perhaps Lee Chang-dong’s auteurist virtuosity

Published - November 09, 2026 12:24 pm IST

A still from ‘Possible Love’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

It is through the works of filmmakers like Lee Chang-dong that I have started to better understand and appreciate the etymology of the word ‘auteur’ — that rare writerly sensibility so singular that every frame seems to bear the imprint of an unmistakable literary temperament that makes cinema feel authored in the most intimate sense of the word.

My second encounter with the Korean auteur after his masterful Burning (2018) was another reminder that few contemporary filmmakers understand the anatomy of modern human misery with quite this much formal intelligence. Led by one of the year’s most unforgettable ensembles, featuring Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong, Possible Love won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, and has been selected as South Korea’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.

The film opens by invoking the Tenth Commandment, borrowing its dedication to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog 10. Rather than attempting a remake, Lee takes the injunction against covetousness and subjects it to a more uncomfortable interrogation, bringing two married couples from opposite ends of South Korea’s economic spectrum into an increasingly fraught entanglement following the violent suppression of a factory workers’ strike.

On one side are Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), a taciturn factory worker whose life has unravelled following his dismissal and a brutal police assault during a workers’ strike, and Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), his spirited wife, who has spent the intervening years watching the man she fell in love with recede into depression, resentment and alcoholism. On the other are Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an aspiring documentarian who sees their misfortune as the subject of her next film, and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), her fabulously wealthy, generationally privileged husband. Much as he did in Burning, Lee takes an almost novelistic interest in the strange intimacies that emerge when these disparate lives begin to overlap. But he is equally attentive to the social/class hierarchies of these encounters, letting seemingly innocuous exchanges, or displays of affluence and unspoken resentments, contaminate the possibility of genuine human connection.

It is fascinating to watch Lee make the proximity of wealth such a destabilising experience for Mi-ok — Jeon Do-yeon is an absolute stunner throughout, bringing an irrepressible, almost mischievous vitality to her performance — whose growing attachment to Ye-ji is complicated by an acute awareness of everything her new friend takes for granted. The designer handbag she furtively photographs, the clothes she gently reprimands Ye-ji for wearing around impoverished workers, or the almost girlish fascination with her friend’s impossibly handsome husband; these are not incidental manifestations of covetousness so much as the small, humiliating negotiations of someone suddenly made conscious of the limits of their own existence. Lee is too astute to treat envy as a private moral deficiency when its objects are so conspicuously distributed along lines of economic privilege. Ye-ji and Mi-ok might have different ideas of what constitutes a desirable life, but as the iconic LCD (Lee Chang-dong) Soundsystem reminds us, sometimes you have to simply ‘Covet Yrslf Clean’.

A still from ‘Possible Love’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

Lee extends this suspicion of unequal power into the very act of storytelling, making Ye-ji’s documentary ambitions an uncomfortable exercise in the ethics of looking. Her interest in the casualties of corporate restructuring is ostensibly commendable, but the pampered documentarian’s attempts to insinuate herself into Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s working-class existence feels appropriately contrived. She wants proximity to their suffering without quite recognising the indignities involved in making that suffering available for her artistic consumption. The film’s recurring image of Ye-ji lurking behind her camera, even during moments of private intimacy, is a pointed joke at the expense of her professed empathy. Lee seems less interested in questioning her intentions than exposing her astonishing inability to recognise how thoroughly her privilege conditions the terms of her engagement. Even the name of Ye-ji’s dog, Blue, feels like a loaded choice, with Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue hidden just out of vision in her editing-room wall and the blue-collar world just beyond her field of vision.