Given its subject matter, Possible Love is almost certain to draw comparisons to director Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, a film that also reckons with wealth inequality and class envy. But while both (excellent) movies share a distinct and fervent consciousness of these issues, Possible Love feels like it could happen to someone you know. Perhaps it already has.
Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s first full-length film since 2018’s Burning is a dense and sprawling affair, clocking in at nearly three hours and featuring a story that almost exclusively revolves around the act of recounting a story. That story is about many things: the plight of the working class, corporate exploitation, and the long-term impact of unemployment on the mental health of workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. It also asks who gets to tell those kinds of stories, and who gets to merely survive them. It will almost certainly feel like a gut punch to many—in our area specifically—who are finding themselves grieving a job loss and struggling to reestablish a sense of self-worth in its wake.
Set in an unnamed town where two years earlier a manufacturing company fired 40 percent of its workforce in the name of “restructuring,” Possible Love follows two very different married couples: laid-off welder Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), as well as the more well-to-do Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her nepo baby husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). The four cross paths at a wake for one of Ho-seok’s fellow union workers who appears to have committed suicide, where Ye-ji, an inexperienced documentary filmmaker, is attempting to make a movie about the workers who lost their jobs.
Most are very visibly still grappling with the trauma of the layoffs—not only the loss of income, but the physical scars of the violence doled out during the failed strike at the fictional SP Heavy Industries factory. There’s also still-simmering tension between the former “brothers” who were let go and those who remained employed. But Ye-ji hones in on Ho-seok and his wife, immediately sensing that there’s more to their story than meets the eye.
While Ho-seok displays little interest in reliving his trauma for Ye-ji’s project, Mi-ok is more willing to open up to her. The wives bond over the following weeks, as Mi-ok shares stories of solidarity during the strike and her family’s struggles in its aftermath. Jeon and Cho’s chemistry is delightful, and their burgeoning friendship feels so genuine and warm that it’s easy to forget Ye-ji has fairly significant ulterior motives, at least until we see her surreptitiously insert her camera into a conversation or ask Mi-ok to retell a particularly moving or meaningful anecdote so she can record it. How much of their relationship is real and how much is a quest for content? When does empathy cross the line into exploitation? These are questions that Possible Love doesn’t really answer, but the truth may well depend on who you ask.
Dense and deftly written by Lee and Jungmi Oh, the script is personal rather than proselytizing, focusing on slice-of-life moments and quiet emotional beats, edged with an occasionally brutal political edge. The various socioeconomic divides between the story’s central couples are always apparent, from Mi-ok’s embarrassment at her family’s living situation to her obvious admiration for Ye-ji’s designer clothes. When the two couples take a trip to Sang-woo’s family vacation home on the coast (which has a literal caretaker who can be summoned by blowing a whistle), the film’s color palette becomes visibly sunnier and brighter. Cho deliberately leans in to Ye-ji’s obliviousness, playing yet another class-blind rich lady (see also: Parasite) who may insist her care is genuine, but who is, at best, a sort of lifestyle tourist gawking at the hardships and struggles Mi-ok describes. Jeon, for her part, is warm and vibrant throughout, recounting her early years with her husband and longing for the kind of freedom that Ye-ji so unassumingly possesses, whether in her work, her home, or her marriage.
But it is Sul who quietly steals the film. Ho-seok is gruff, difficult, and not particularly easy to like. Yet, his suffering is evident: He drinks to fall asleep at night and can’t commit to the therapy sessions many of his former co-workers attend. In his mind, he has lost the dignity and sense of self he found in his work, as well as the friends he used to consider his family. (A particularly harrowing sequence shows him following one of his still-employed ex-colleagues as he buys a cake for his son’s birthday and looming in the background of the family’s celebratory restaurant dinner like Banquo’s ghost.) But as Ho-seok finally finds the words to describe what happened to him during the strike, Sul is masterful, harrowingly recounting an event that broke both his body and his faith in humanity.
Though some will doubtless find Possible Love’s extended run time daunting (at 164 minutes it’s true it probably could be quite a bit shorter), its story’s slow-burn dividends are worth the investment. The film is both a richly complex character study and a five-alarm fire warning of the human cost connected to the sweeping changes in our global workforce as technology advances seemingly unchecked and corporations chase profits over people. This isn’t a movie that seeks to scare its viewers—its message is more intimate and human than that—but, honestly, it probably should.
Possible Love (R, 164 mins.) premieres on Netflix on Nov. 6.
