It took director Lee Chang-dong eight years to return to the screen and to his enduring themes of class and desire, money and human relationships, with the value of human labor added to the layer.
Possible Love, Lee’s first film since Burning in 2018, brings together two married couples whose lives could hardly be further apart.
Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, is a laid-off factory worker left scarred by a violent labor dispute. His wife Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, works at a mask factory and struggles to hold together a family whose economic foundations have collapsed.
Across the class divide are documentary filmmaker Ye-ji, played by Cho Yeo-jeong, and her affluent husband Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung.
Ye-ji sees in Ho-seok and Mi-ok a story worth filming. What begins as the relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects gradually becomes friendship, intrusion, attraction, envy and exploitation, until it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and another begins.
The film is ostensibly about a laid-off worker. It is also about class conflict, marriage and desire. It is about whether money merely determines how people live or eventually begins to determine who they believe themselves to be. And it is about the ethics of people who turn another person's suffering into material for art.
Lee himself refuses to reduce it to one of those things.
At a press conference in Seoul on Monday, as the team sported the Silver Lion trophy brought home from Venice, Lee described the film as simultaneously a story of dismissed workers, class conflict, filmmaking ethics and relationships between people. The world, he said, is not simple enough to be understood through one dimension.
Ye-ji wants to understand Ho-seok and Mi-ok. Yet every time she turns on her camera, the question hovers: Is she approaching their pain, or appropriating it?
Lee has said this is a question he has wrestled with throughout his career — whether a filmmaker can tell another person's story without consuming that person's suffering or using it simply as raw material.
That unease gives Possible Love much of its moral tension. The wealthy couple may appear to possess the freedom the other couple lacks, but money has not liberated them from want. It has simply changed the nature of what they want.
Sang-woo is outwardly generous and civilized, yet Zo describes him as a man capable of becoming frightening when desire turns toward something he should not possess. Ye-ji, meanwhile, begins to discover that material security and a fulfilled life are not necessarily the same thing.
Mi-ok stands somewhere else.
Jeon describes her as a woman trying to protect her own value and her family against forces — money and class among them — capable of stripping both away.
It becomes clearest not in one of its dramatic confrontations but in a lengthy sequence at a treatment center, where laid-off workers and their families talk about the aftermath of the strike.
By conventional cinematic standards, the scene runs long. Lee deliberately lets it.
One woman remembers the extraordinary sense of community created when wives and children camped alongside workers during the strike. She recalls it as the happiest period of her life. She wonders whether his present suffering somehow comes from having once been so happy.
Another recalls finishing a night shift and going with his wife to an air-conditioned big-box store during the day, pushing a shopping cart around for hours. That, to him, had felt like luxury.
These are tiny memories, almost embarrassingly ordinary.
A job is never only a paycheck. Work accumulates routines, pride, humiliation, friendships, quarrels, family memories and a sense of belonging. Lose the job and a person can discover that something far less measurable has disappeared with it.
Lee said he wanted the audience to hear directly from people who felt as though they had lost their identities along with their jobs and were left with an empty self inside.
In 2026, it is difficult to watch those scenes without thinking beyond the labor dispute that inspired them.
The world is now debating not only whether artificial intelligence will replace human labor, but how much human work will remain necessary at all. At the extreme end lies the darker argument over whether artificial intelligence itself could one day threaten humanity.
Possible Love offers no position on AI. It does, however, pose a question that the AI debate too often misses.
When we calculate the value of replacing a worker, what exactly are we calculating?
Productivity can be measured. Labor costs can be reduced. Tasks can be automated.
But the little things Lee's workers remember — pulling a shopping cart with a spouse, sleeping beside striking colleagues, belonging to a workplace, being needed by a family — belong to another ledger altogether.
This is the part of labor a machine cannot replace because it is not really about labor. It is about being human.
Everyone envies. Everyone desires. Everyone carries shame. Everyone is capable of crossing a line.
Even the filmmaker herself cannot stand outside the system she is examining. Ye-ji depends on her wealthy husband; Lee has acknowledged that a film director, too, depends on capital to make films. In that sense, he joked darkly, perhaps he too is "married to capital."
The admission matters because Possible Love does not pretend that moral purity is available simply by recognizing inequality.
Its question is harder: Knowing that we are entangled in money, class, desire and unequal power, is it still possible to approach another person's suffering without coveting it, exploiting it or turning it into something useful to ourselves?
Is love possible under those conditions?
At nearly three hours, the film demands patience. Some stretches feel deliberately resistant to the rhythms audiences have become accustomed to.
Lee leaves conversations running after another filmmaker might have cut away. Silences linger. Awkwardness is allowed to become genuinely awkward. Yet the slowness gradually becomes part of the film's argument.
People cannot be understood at algorithmic speed.
They cannot be reduced to worker and employer, rich and poor, exploiter and victim. To understand another person would require entering a life we can never fully enter, then returning to our own with some recognition of what we have failed to know.
By the time Possible Love reaches its unsettling final stretch, money, sex, class resentment and artistic ambition have pulled at the two couples from every direction.
What survives is less a resolution than a stubborn insistence on dignity.
The full moon offers a fitting final image: something whole above lives made painfully incomplete, an abundance that neither employment nor wealth can bestow and neither unemployment nor poverty can entirely take away.
Eight years after Burning, Lee came back with even more complex riddle. When work, money and everything attached to them are stripped away, what remains of a person?
Possible Love answers without quite answering. A human life does.
*The author is the managing editor of AJP
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